


Saying Your Name

by brideofquiet



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Afterlife, Choices, Explicit Sexual Content, Happy Ending, Homesickness, M/M, Magic Realism, Medical Trauma, Not Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Compliant, Not Catholic Church Compliant, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Post-Serum Steve Rogers, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Serum Bucky Barnes, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Stucky Big Bang 2017, post-serum Bucky Barnes, suicide ideation, surreality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-18
Updated: 2017-08-21
Packaged: 2018-12-12 22:32:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 43,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11746527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brideofquiet/pseuds/brideofquiet
Summary: Glancing back up, Steve realizes that there’s something off about what he’s seeing. It takes him a moment to place it, overcome as he is with seeing his home—and it is his home, the Brooklyn he grew up in. But the longer he stares, the more the image starts to distort. His own memories layer over top, a perfect duplication, but it’s like a layer of paint. He scrubs a hand over his eyes, stares harder and—there!The colors flicker out like cheap lights, fading away into grayscale till the sky is off-white, the East River churning charcoal below him.It’s eerie, uncanny, the not-quite-rightness of it all. If he doesn’t focus on anything in particular, the image snaps back into place, right again. It unsettles him, making him nervous and flighty in place of the warm familiarity he’d felt only moments before.Then he remembers: Hadn’t Bucky called to him from just this spot?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story has been a long time coming and there are many people to thank. Firstly, to the Slack gang, without whom I don't know that this would exist at all. Everyone's encouragement and friendship this summer gave me the courage to write beyond that first scene. Thank you.
> 
> Second, to my beta [drowningbydegrees](http://archiveofourown.org/users/drowningbydegrees). I value your help so much. Everyone go read her story too!
> 
> And lastly, to my artist [sorrowingsolider](sorrowingsoldier.tumblr.com). Thank you so much for choosing to work on my story, and for creating such a cool physical piece of art, which is embedded at the end of chapter one.
> 
> There's also a playlist for this fic, which I curated myself, that follows the story in chronological order. You can listen [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/wendlabergman/playlist/1E1JAh5m80Qoe6UPOznuA1).
> 
> A few things: This story was inspired by the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, and because of that, it does deal with certain themes. I didn't tag it for character death because I felt it didn't necessarily apply here, though if that's something that bothers you—tread lightly, but give it a chance. I doubt it's what you expect. Title comes from Richard Siken's "Saying Your Names," which served as great inspiration but is not the poem quoted at the beginning nor end of this.

 

 

 

> Hold onto your voice. Hold onto your breath. Don’t make a noise,  
>  don’t leave the room until I come back from the dead for you. I will  
>  come back from the dead for you. This could be a city. This could be a  
>  graveyard. This could be the basket of a big balloon. Leave the lights  
>  on. Leave a trail of letters like those little knots of bread we used to  
>  dream about. We used to dream about them. We used to do a lot of  
>  things.  
>  \- "You Are Jeff," Richard Siken

 

When he closes his eyes, the world is a wash of greys and blacks, bright flashes of orange and red at the edges of his vision. And blue, mostly blue: the blue of the sky through breaking glass, the blue of his uniform, the blue of the river rushing up to cradle the soft weight of his body as he falls—and the most important blue. The cold, empty steel of it staring into him, through him, past him. The brief flicker of a familiar flame buried in the fog of it before he falls down, down, down. His own blue eyes drifting closed as the water devours him.

When he opens his eyes, everything is the white of overexposure. It’s like coming out of a matinee and forgetting that the sun is still out, flicking on the bathroom light in the middle of the night, the shock of a flashbang gone off too close. He reels back from it, blinking hard and stumbling backward. His hands come up to rub at his face, rub away the bright, and he doesn’t notice the lack of a shattered cheekbone or the whole, undamaged state of his knuckles.

Steve opens his eyes again, and the white is still there. It has not diminished. Some small part of his mind accepts the notion that this is the way the world must be now. After all that’s happened, it doesn’t surprise him. It would make sense if the world had become bright nothingness, a dimensionless field.

But then it occurs to him, dredged up from some grade school science lesson, the smell of chalk in his nose: white light contains all wavelengths of visible light. This place may not be nothingness then. It might be everything all at once, a culmination. It feels like nothing, though—neither cold nor hot, no real sense of anything on his skin, no smells. The only thing he can feel is his own body. Steve has never been in a sensory deprivation tank, but he thinks it may feel something like this.

Something catches his eye, in the corner of it, in a place with no corners or edges. It’s not a something, not really—it’s an absence, a dark spot in his peripheral vision like he stared at the sun too long. Steve turns to face it, but the thing only flits again to the edges of his vision like a wild animal, like something that doesn’t want to be seen. It skulks in the distance, menacing, growing closer and larger with each passing moment.

As the emptiness approaches him, Steve makes out a vague human shape in it. It looks like someone punched a hole right through the whiteness, cut it out crudely with scissors or a blade. The figure moves, slinks toward him like a person if people could be made of shadow. He knows one or two who might be.

Soon the thing is next to him, or as next to him as something can be on a plane with no way to judge space. It could be a thousand feet from him. It could be right on top of him.

 _Steven Grant Rogers,_ comes a crackling whisper.

The voice sounds layered, sounds like nothing—everyone in the world speaking at once, a thought in his own head. The hair on the back of Steve’s neck rises. It is comforting to remember that he still has hair, and that he can feel it rise. That some semblance of physicality still exists. He holds out his own hands in front of him, makes sure they’re still there, turns them over a few times to check that they won’t vanish into the light.

“Yes,” he says after a moment, because the darkness seems to be waiting on his reply.

It does not seem to care that he would like an answer in turn. He turns to look at it, and this time the thing stays where it is and lets itself be seen. The shape stands tall, proud like a man and something in the profile of his nose looks familiar—but then it shifts, warps into a softer shape, sloping lines and the curve of a hip—a shape like a helmet on a head—a face without any flesh, hard outline of a skull that suddenly sprouts long, smoking tangles of hair and the arm glints even though it is a void, a lack of color—

 _It is unwise to look for too long,_ the voice intones. It comes from everywhere; it comes from inside Steve’s own head. He turns away sharply and the brightness that surrounds him presses against his eyes again, brilliant and blinding.

“Who are you?” Steve asks, and then thinks better of it. “Or what?”

 _I am a who. I am a what,_ the voice says. _I am mustard gas and tuberculosis. I am falling, freezing, to the ground. I am too little food or too much liquor. I am the bullet in a gun, and I am the finger that pulls the trigger. The endgame of disease, famine, war, life. I am the end, but I am only the beginning._

Steve has had many a macabre, morbid conversation in his life. It’s part of the business of war. Soldiers who may die sometimes like to talk about the fact that they may die so that they don’t have to think about it at night, when they’re alone, when there’s no one left to talk to. Every soldier needs a healthy dose of fear for their life. That’s how they keep fighting sometimes, when the wars get too hard and the only motivations left are the selfish ones.

Steve never had that, not really, not in the way that he was supposed to. He was always ready, always prepared to put his body and his life on the line for any cause that seemed worthy enough. His reckless integrity may have been a byproduct of poor health—he would rather go out hitting than hacking. The things that were worth getting hurt for, worth dying for, got bigger as he got older, but that belief in purposes and principles more valuable than his own life always took up that much space. It took up the whole of him sometimes, till there was no room for anything else.

He has never feared death, not for himself. It was always meant to strike him early anyway.

He has never feared death in the abstract, Steve corrects. When Death stands next to you and tells you not to look it in the eyes, it muddies your perspective. His heart rattles in the confines of his ribcage, telling him to run, to fly away if he can. It catches and lurches the way it used to, in a way he hasn’t felt in a long time.

Steve is no coward though, and he knows that the heart is not always the wisest part of the body.

He does not run from Death. Like he’s done too many times before, Steve stands right next to it, and he greets it with a nod of his head.

 _You have evaded me for a long time now, Steven._ The voice is gravel crunching under heavy boots, the whisper of wind through the trees, sharp snap of breaking bones and soft chatter of birds on a spring morning. Blood-curdling and honey-sweet, it’s a fresh shock each time he hears it.

“I wasn’t trying to,” he says. “Honest.”

_I know this._

“Is it my time now?” He thinks of blue.

_Yes and no._

He forgets for a moment that there is no face to be read and looks askance towards the shadowy figure. It retreats to the corners of his vision again, and he turns back out to face the white plains.

_I will grant you a pass, for the help you gave to me. But make no mistake, this will be the last._

Steve’s brow crumples inward, heavy. “Help?”

_You named a lost soul, one for which I had been searching a long time. You named him and brought him back to himself. I found him. I took him to where he belongs._

Steve’s heart falls silent in his chest—stops beating completely, in a way that’s only possible in a place that isn’t real. He counts _one two three four five_ before it lurches back to slow life, a train chugging valiantly uphill. His breath comes back too, from wherever it had gone, swallowed up or stuck in his throat or cast out to sea.

“Bucky?”

_James Buchanan Barnes._

The train engine of his heart falters and slides back down the hill, sinking halfway down into his stomach. He feels nauseous.

“Bucky.”

_Yes._

“You took him?” The words burn in his mouth, sit thick and tortuous as acid on his tongue.

_Yes._

“Where did you take him?”

_Where do you think, Steven?_

“Here?”

_This is not the afterlife._

“Then what is this place?”

_An in-between. A place for us to speak._

Steve pauses in his line of questioning, and when he swallows he feels it all the way down the column of his neck, through his chest and settling into his stomach. He takes a slow breath, in through the nose, and lets it out in a hot gust through his mouth. He calculates, wrapping his hands into tight fists, and considers before he asks the question again. When he does, his voice is hard and deliberate, a strategic first hit.

“Where is he?”

_Steven._

“Is it somewhere that I can go?”

 _Steven._ The reproach in the voice is familiar, and it only encourages him.

“Can I bring him back?”

_That is not up to me._

He turns again in surprise, because old habits get suspended in purgatory hard. This time the shadow stays solid long enough for Steve to recognize the shape of his mother’s body.  “Who is it up to, then?”

_You are not the only god to walk this earth, Steven._

“I—I’m no god.”

_I know this. Not everyone does. You do have a real one among you, your friend—what is his name?_

“Thor.”

_Yes, yes. The Norse got it right, at least a little. I will grant them that much. So did everyone else, in one way or another. Sometimes believing in something is enough to make it real._

“What’s your point?” His hands clench to the point of pain, fingernails cutting shallow indents into his palms. Impatience rises like a wave through his body.

_My point is that I am no longer in charge of your friend’s soul, according to governance. He is beyond my dealing now._

“Where is he?” Steve repeats.

_Some questions are better left unanswered._

“Then why tell me at all?” Desperation and frustration make his voice sharp and shrill.

 _It is time for you to wake up now, Steven Grant Rogers,_ the voice says impassively. _Your friend Samuel Thomas Wilson waits for you._

Even as the shadow says it, Steve’s eyes light on the edges of the white—because there are edges now, where faint traces of color seep through like watercolor paint on thick artist’s paper. A sound plays from inside his own ears, the clap of drums and high strain of strings and a rich, unfamiliar voice singing. He turns his whole body, hands flying out in a frenzy to grasp at whatever is there. The plea tumbles out of his mouth as the music builds louder in his skull. “But you didn’t tell me—“

His hands close around nothing, wispy tendrils of inky smoke left behind. Pain settles behind his eyes like sediment, a hot point pulsing high on his left cheek. His entire body feels bowled over, slammed around, like he’s hit a wall or a wall hit him, repeatedly and with purpose.

He snaps his eyes closed in frustration.

Slowly, slowly, Steve opens his eyes again. The color feels like too much for a moment, but then he hears the song and then he sees Sam and—

Whatever he’d just been dreaming of dissipates like mist in his mind. He reaches for it, tries to hold onto whatever it was, but it drifts away and out and gone. He’s left thinking about God.

 

The doctors keep him the hospital for four days. They would have kept him longer, if he had allowed it. Steve can only take so much daytime television though, and they have the whole hall shut down for him besides. It feels selfish to stay when he could recover just as well at home. It’s also too quiet, too much time on his own to think.

As soon as he can walk in his own power without feeling like his gut is tearing itself back open, he asks to be discharged. The doctor on his case doesn’t let him go quietly, but does eventually clear him after removing his stitches and scheduling physical therapy appointments He thanks her and his nurses as he leaves.

An agent, one of the few left scrabbling in SHIELD’s remnants, meets him in the hall and walks him to a car. The agent drives him back to his apartment in silence, not even the radio on. The quiet feels like suffocating, but Steve can’t bring himself to try any small talk. _How’s rooting the corruption out of the agency going?_

The agent walks him all the way to his door before taking his leave. As Steve keys in and steps inside, he doubts that he is truly alone. He knows they swept his place—hell, it’s probably bugged. He can’t blame them, knows they think they’re acting in his best interest. Isn’t that the way it goes? It’s always meant to be for the best.

He wouldn’t be able to explain to them why he doesn’t really care if he gets shot again. He can’t explain it to himself either. He just doesn’t. His desire to survive feels entirely absent, a physical emptiness he can feel in his chest.

Steve spends maybe five minutes standing in his living room, staring at the bullet holes in the wall there, before he turns tail and leaves again.

He ends up at church.

He picks a new one to go to every Sunday or so. D.C. is packed to the gills with churches, so it’s not difficult. He mostly chooses Catholic parishes, but he’s learned that the Episcopal services are similar enough that he can follow along. This one is Catholic though, one of the Our Ladies just a few blocks from his building.

He doesn’t realize that it’s Sunday until an usher stops him in the vestibule. He tells Steve that he has to wait to sit until the priest is finished giving the homily. Steve considers just leaving again, walking to a park, but as he looks through the windows in the double doors, something about all the people in the pews compels him to stay. He can’t put a finger on it, but he wants to be here. Needs to, maybe.

As the priest finishes, the usher directs him to a pew in the back. The lady he sits next to smiles warmly at him, and he tries to return it before ducking his head for the prayer.

Steve doesn’t pray anymore, not really, hasn’t done it regularly in a long time. Sunday Mass is more a force of habit than anything else, the way you brush your teeth in the morning. It’s not something he has to think about—he just does it, because that’s what he’s always done. Brush your teeth, go to church, go through the motions. The familiarity of it is nice if nothing else, soothing like a soak in the bath.

But he prays this time, the words tumbling unbidden out of his mouth, under his breath. The rest of the congregation drones the same words around him, a soft rumble building in his ears till it’s all he can hear. “We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of Heaven and Earth, of all that is seen and unseen …”

It’s easy to settle down onto the kneeler and bow his head. He clasps his hands together and closes his eyes, and the rote physicality of it feels as close to comfort as he has known in recent memory. The voices joining around him shake something loose in his chest, and he relaxes as realization settles into its place.

It should hurt, what he understands now, but it doesn’t. Instead, it’s emboldening. He hears himself increasing in volume, till he speaks at full voice on the last lines.

“We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. _Amen.”_

 

With Natasha’s kiss still lingering on his cheek, Steve flips the file open. He sees the bigger picture first, the awful one—Bucky, frozen and blue. The smaller one clipped to the bottom corner feels like a deliberate dig, the comparison of the wide open eyes and parted lips. A living man and a dead one—though those things aren’t mutually exclusive, Steve has learned. He already met one ghost today. He of all people should know that a headstone means very little.

When he tells Sam, “You don’t have to come with me,” it’s not what he means. He means, “You can’t.” But Sam is a good friend, and Steve knows he wants to help—is grateful for his willingness to help, after Bucky nearly killing the both of them. So he hedges instead, but Sam is persistent.

“When do we start?”

He won’t lie to him. There’s too much subterfuge in the air already. Steve glances at Sam’s face, set and determined, and knows that he has to tell him. “We don’t.”

“What do you mean, we don’t?” Sam presses, frowning.

“There’s nothing we can do.” Steve shrugs his shoulders.

“I know the man’s good, but I’ll help you turn over every rock if that’s what you want, Steve—”

“No,” Steve cuts over him. Sam raises his eyebrows, so Steve continues. “I would want that, if we would find anything, but we won’t.”

Sam waits for a beat, waiting on him to elaborate, but Steve’s attention is on the file again. He strokes a thumb over the smaller picture. “Why’s that?” Sam asks gently.

Still staring down at the picture, Steve takes a slow, steadying breath. He knows it’s true. He doesn’t understand how he knows it, but it’s lodged deep in his bones, more substantial than fact. Steve thinks he’s known since the moment he blinked awake in his hospital bed, though it didn’t dawn on him till that Sunday.

But he hasn’t said it out loud yet. When he does, he tastes the words on his tongue, bittersweet.

“Because Bucky is dead.”

 

Sam looks for him anyway. Steve tries to tell him, tries to explain, but how can he say it? Is there any way to lay it out plain the way he can feel it in his core that Bucky isn’t alive anymore? He can’t even explain it to himself, just _knows_. He can’t put words to it in his own head, to that absolute faith—and that’s what it is, faith, as ironic as it feels to phrase it that way. How could he explain that to Sam, to anyone in a way that would make sense?

He stops bothering with it then. He just lets Sam try to help, because Sam thinks this is what he needs. It’s in Steve’s best interest—because he does it for Steve, not Bucky. Sam only knows Bucky as that cold-blooded killer on the bridge. Steve thinks Sam would like Buck if he did know him, if Steve told him about him, but Steve keeps Bucky squirreled away for now, all to himself.

Sam will get to meet Bucky. This he knows too.

Because knowing that Bucky is dead—that he’s gone from this world, gone away somewhere else—doesn’t stop him from keeping faith that he will be back. There’s the same divide again, between himself and the knowledge, a deep and inexplicable chasm between them. But there is a way. He feels that in his core too, right down to the fiery center of him, where his heart thumps out an unyielding rhythm in his chest. It feels like that, like his heart beat. He doesn’t even have to consider it—he just knows that it is there.

After all, he’s thought Bucky dead twice now. As the proverb says, the third time’s the charm.

There’s one major problem though: How do you find a dead man? As solid as Steve’s conviction that he will find him is, he has no idea how to go about it. There’s no clear starting point here. There is no map of the journey from life to death.

He keeps going to church, hoping for some kind of epiphany there in the pews. It’s nice, good even, listening to the priest talk about joy and redemption. These are people who believe in life after death. Steve still feels like there’s something missing though, but he can’t put it together. He wakes up each morning more frustrated than the day before. The dreams don’t help.

It’s one dream really, the same one every night. Steve would think it a nice reprieve from the usual nightmares if he had any idea what it meant.

In his dream, he is in a white field. The sky is white too, and so are his clothes—a sea of white, blindingly bright. It feels familiar in a way that twists his insides up, like he should remember this place but can’t.

There is a door in the dream. It sits twenty feet ahead of him, set into the whiteness as if it were a wall. Maybe it is—Steve can never get close enough to tell. It’s silvery, smoky, reflective and gleaming faintly in the glare of some invisible light source. If he looks at it long enough, he can see the edges tremble and shake as if it were a curtain, though it is most certainly a door. He can see the frame, and the knob which glints brighter than the rest of it. Below the knob, in the latch, there is a key made of black. It’s not coated nickel silver—literally made of black, made of darkness in the same way the plain is made of white light.

Steve thinks, _If only I could get to the door and turn the key._ He thinks, _I could walk through the door and find him._ He knows Bucky is on the other side of the door. He can sense him. Steve just needs to get over that threshold, and they will be together again. Finally, finally. It’s been such a long time.

In his dream each night, Steve’s heart reaches out for the door, and his body follows. Each night, he makes it just a few paces before something catches his eye. On the edge of his vision, he spots something dark, the same kind of darkness as the key. He turns his head to look, but it darts away, and when he turns back to the door, it’s twenty feet away again. He turns around to try to find what distracted him, spins on his heel and cries out in anger, but he can only ever catch a glimpse of it. At whatever point in his rotation he stops, the door materializes in front of him again, twenty feet away and shimmering silkily. He shouts again and lunges for it, thinking that if he’s fast enough he can get there.

Some undetectable force always grabs him around the middle, hauls him backward and up and away. Then he wakes, panting in his own bed, the phantom feeling of limbs lodged around his midsection still lingering.

 

He throws himself into his work, because it’s the only thing he knows to do. There’s certainly a lot to be done anyway. With SHIELD in shambles, the Avengers have been left with a significantly heavier work load as old threats and new ones come crawling out of the woodwork. They and various agency task forces set to rooting out HYDRA among all the other daily threats.

Steve might throw himself too hard into it. He winds up in medical more times than he cares to count—bruised ribs, knife wound, twisted ankle. None of it is serious enough to raise anyone’s suspicions about it but his own, and he doesn’t care enough to rein himself in. Physical hurts are rarely as bad as you think they will be, and he stopped minding the pain so much almost a century ago.

Oddly, it feels like the right thing to do somehow—risking his life. Each time he puts himself in the way of a civilian and some jumped-up bad guy, he half hopes the villain has enough firepower to take him out. The morbidity of it doesn’t scare him. Nothing seems to, and that’s the only worrying thing.

Because each time he’s in the firing line, each time someone’s got him on the ropes, he would swear he can _smell_ him. The inexpensive cologne, the aftershave, the cigarettes and something distinctly Bucky all on his own sneaks in on an inhale. He only barely remembers why he should hold up the shield and duck out of the way.

That’s how he ends up in the sightlines of a massive railgun—only halfway in uniform, helmet somewhere on the ground behind him, no way out that he can see.

He’d thrown his shield to Natasha in a split-second rescue attempt just moments ago. She was fine if blown backward, the electrical blast having ricocheted off the center of the star. Now the villain, tucked under a bridge on his self-driving SUV, turns his weapon on Steve and grins at him.

Steve takes the brief hesitation to lurch toward him several yards. That’s been the hard part here—getting close enough to do any real damage. Sam and Tony are off fighting some airborne minions, so he and Nat haven’t had any air support to take this guy out. He gets close though, nearly under the bridge, when he hears the grating laughter and the sound of the gun charging up to fire.

“Steve!” Natasha shouts, and he turns just enough to catch the shield as she flings it at him. For an instant, he stares down the barrel of the gun and doesn’t hold it up to cover himself—but as it fires, instinct takes over, and he does. The blast pings off the shield, knocking him back a few steps, but he’s fine.

The bridge, however, is not. The blast hits it full on. The concrete fissures around the point of impact, cracks spreading till the overpass starts to crumple under its own weight. The bad guy doesn’t seem to notice though, still parked underneath it, turning his gun toward a now defenseless Natasha.

It’s been the back and forth game through this whole thing, so Steve throws his shield back toward her. She catches it in practiced hands. Once again, the blast hits dead center on the metal. Steve ducks forward as the energy of it bounces back toward the bridge, which he is now well and truly under, close enough that he could rip the guy right out of his perch.

A curious sound gives him pause.

Steve glances up to see that that last blast did it. The bridge is collapsing. It’s going to fall right on top of him. He knows it—he can see it happening, little chunks of asphalt already raining down around him. He knows it, but he doesn’t move. He has time. He sees the villain topple sideways out of his vehicle, abandoning his weapon to find cover, but Steve doesn’t move.

Instead, he watches as the bridge shudders and shakes above him. It wavers. Steve doesn’t, standing stock still beneath it. He can hear Natasha shouting at him, distantly, the sound of it garbled like he’s underwater. Her words don’t register. He doesn’t think about them.

All he can think as the concrete finally gives way and rushes down to him is, _I’m coming for you._

A slab slams into him, into the center of his chest, and he thinks it’s right that he should be hit most heavily there of all places. There is a brief moment where he feels the pain of it, blooming outward from his sternum and radiating through every nerve of his body.

Then his heart stutters to a stop in his chest, and everything goes black.

The darkness holds him, swaddles him close for an agonizing moment, and then he is released. He can see the white even with his eyes closed. When he opens them, it’s arresting, the same way it is every night. He blinks heavily against the overwhelming, glaring nothingness of it. Then the door materializes in front of him, silver and shivering, twenty feet away.

Steve waits a beat for the usual lurch of his heart that will call his body toward it, but nothing comes. He realizes then that his heart is still and silent in his chest. It sits like a stone in the center of him. His breath goes out too, but then he looks at the door again, really _looks_ at it and sees a sliver of pale grey light in the gap beneath it. He’s never seen that before.

The light shows a shadow, pacing beyond the door.

He throws himself forward, tumbling toward it with as much force as the bridge toppled down. The black spot slips into the corner of his left eye, and it’s like a blind spot, Steve realizes. Then he realizes something else, recognizes the dark shapelessness of it for the first time since that initial meeting months ago. It settles into him, more comforting than it should be to know that Death is at his side and has been all along.

The door, predictably, tries to evade him. He feels that same tug around his midsection, yanking him back, but he leans against it and _runs_ , full tilt, top speed. The pressure snaps and gives way, and Steve finally, finally makes it to the door. Slams into it rather, the full force of his body pummeling right into the silky, smooth plane of it. It doesn’t give under his weight the way a normal door would. It doesn’t bow or bend or creak, just stays immobile in its frame. Steve pounds his fists against it, crying out and really crying, hot tears streaming down his cheeks. He can _smell_ him. Fuck, he can _hear_ him breathing just on the other side of the goddamn door, if it would just _open—_

Something covers his right fist where it’s planted against the panel. The shocking freeze of it makes him jerk away, out of its grip, away from the burning cold.

 _Like this, Steven_ , comes the gravelly, syrupy voice and Steve remembers all at once. The thick black shape, not unlike a hand, covers his own again and guides it down toward the doorknob. It presses in against his back, snug along the the line of him and pushing farther like it’s trying to work its way inside of him. He feels the cold seep through his clothes and into his skin, beyond that and into his blood and organs till he’s numb with it.

His hand curled around the doorknob and the darkness curved around his hand, another inky black limb snakes its wake toward the key in the latch. Steve watches passively, the cold enveloping him and turning his brain sluggish.

Then he hears it, muffled and faint through the door, just on the other side. “Steve? Stevie, honey? Is that you?”

His body reacts before his brain does. Steve elbows the mass behind him hard. He half-expects his arm to sink into it like a pit of molasses, but he connects with something solid and knocks it backward.

“Bucky!” Steve yells, and it’s jarringly loud even in his own ears. “Hang on, I’m coming for you!”

His right hand on the knob, Steve reaches with his left for the black key in the lock. It burns his flesh to touch it, like holding his fingers to the eye of a stove, but he turns it till he hears the lock tumble. He wrenches the knob, shoves a shoulder against the door, yanks the key free, and steps over the threshold.

 

* * *

 

 

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

On the other side, Steve stumbles before catching himself. The door swings shut behind him with a definitive click, but he doesn’t hear it. The sight in front of him is too overwhelming for much of anything to register.

He’s standing on the Brooklyn Bridge, on the walking path under the first tower. The bridge stretches out long before him, leading toward the borough he calls home, into the heart of his own neighborhood. Steve’s breath lodges in his throat. He feels his heart give a single plaintive thud at the sight of it.

Only the key still burning in his hand pulls Steve out of the reverie. He gasps in pain and drops it. His fingers are singed, an angry red impression of the key shaft blistering on his palm. He nearly leaves the key where it is out of spite, but something compels him to quickly pick it back up and tuck it away in his pocket.

Glancing back up, Steve realizes that there’s something off about what he’s seeing. It takes him a moment to place it, overcome as he is with seeing his home—and it is his home, the Brooklyn he grew up in. He can tell even from this far as if by a sixth sense. He knows when he comes down off the walkway onto Tillary Street, he’ll see the Universal Bowling Alley and the Columbia Theatre. The post office up the block will be on his left instead of the right.

But it won’t look right, even then. Because the longer he stares, the more the image starts to distort. His own memories layer over top, a perfect duplication, but it’s like a layer of paint. He scrubs a hand over his eyes, stares harder and— _there!_ The colors flicker out like cheap lights, fading away into grayscale till the sky is off-white, the East River churning charcoal below him. The edges of things look insubstantial too, translucent like he could put his hand through them. He glances over his shoulder, and Manhattan is a sprawling slate-colored smudge against the pale sky.

It’s eerie, uncanny, the not-quite-rightness of it all. If he doesn’t focus on anything in particular, the image snaps back into place, right again. It unsettles him, making him nervous and flighty in place of the warm familiarity he’d felt only moments before.

Then he remembers: Hadn’t Bucky called to him from just this spot? Where is he? Steve glances around for him, nearly panicking. He wants to shout, but something clenched in his chest tells him that he shouldn’t. Instead he leans over the rail, craning his neck to catch a glimpse of him, but there’s nothing in any direction.

There’s nothing. No cars, no people, no birds flying overhead. He can’t even hear the river. He is utterly and completely alone.

Maybe in the borough, maybe in Brooklyn proper that’s where he’ll find him, find anyone. Why would he be all the way out here anyway, this close to Manhattan? Steve heaves himself into a run, careening across the bridge in less time than he knows it should take, even for him. The greys blur together as he reaches the island, where the buildings push insistently out of the haze. Then he’s at street level, and just like he thought, there’s the bowling alley, but the lights inside are off. The whole street is dim, lit only by the indistinct glow of the sky. Steve can’t see the sun; the light emanates from the whole of it.

Even here though, it’s still quiet, empty. It doesn’t look abandoned, Steve realizes—not like everyone packed and left, but like they were never here at all. A terrible feeling wells up in him, starting in his stomach and traveling up till it sits heavy in his mouth like he has to vomit, but there’s nothing there to come up. He wonders if he even has insides anymore.

Steve sinks heavily onto the curb outside the bowling alley, collapsing forward till his head is between his knees. It calms him somewhat, the familiar remedy for queasiness. It’s been so long since he’s felt like this, since before the serum, since—

But that’s not right. No, this is not the first time he’s sat on the street of his home that isn’t his home anymore. This isn’t too much cotton candy before the tilt-a-whirl or hauling himself up the stairs after a night out. This is whiplash of a greater degree. He’s dealt with it before, coming off the ice to a New York that wasn’t his anymore, to a world so like his own but so disorientingly different. Now if he could just remember how in the hell he wrapped his head around it the first time so this spinning, sinking feeling will go away.

He breathes through it the way he knows how, long pulls in through his nose and longer exhales out his mouth. The air smells right, and that’s something to hold onto, the familiar swirling scents of the street and the river, unpleasant but so welcome. He wraps himself up in it—swears he can smell hot dogs and fresh bread baking in the deli a block over. With deep breaths, eventually he comes down enough to open his eyes.

For a moment, it all looks right. For a moment, he forgets that it’s not supposed to.

Then it washes away again, the color bleeding out like watercolor paints. His heart doesn’t beat again, but Steve feels it ache hard enough that he knows it’s still there. He takes another moment to breathe and wipe at his eyes before standing up, dusting his hands off on his pants.

He glances to each side, looking for something, any clue as to where he should go or what he should be doing. There’s nothing though, no indication, so he turns right and starts walking. Hell of an afterlife, this—is this what it was all for then? All that praying and repentance for this? Not much of a payoff, Steve thinks, and then he laughs aloud at his own joke.

It’s the first real sound he’s made since being here. He pauses, startled, as it bounces off the bricks, pinging down the street till it’s gone. Then he laughs again, at himself mostly, and it shakes the last of the clamminess away. He can do this, whatever this is. If Steve Rogers is anything, he is resilient. He’s been to hell before. This place ain’t got nothing on the European theatre.

As he picks himself back up, it’s like someone flipped a switch. He _hears_ something suddenly, just the faintest sound. It trickles down the street toward him like the babble of a brook. He perks up, strains his ears, and listens till he identifies the noise as voices—distinctly human, murmuring in low tones, a familiar cadence. It’s coming from the southwest. He hurtles forward again to chase the sound to its source.

Just as Steve reaches the corner of Flatbush Avenue, a streetcar materializes and slows to a  stop in front of him with a ding of its bells. He decides to roll with the punches this time, however strange the hits may be, and bounds on without a second thought. There’s nothing else for it, unless he wants to walk the whole way till he finds the source of the voices, however far that may be.

The streetcar has no driver, so Steve takes the opportunity to do something he’s always wanted to since he was a kid: sit in the driver’s seat. He plunks down, and it’s not the same thrill he was hoping for with the empty streets and car, but he feels exhilaration lighting him up either way. He clutches at that buoyant feeling, holds it in his hands like a fragile bird as the car begins its steady southbound march.

The ride should take a long time. It should, but it doesn’t. Blocks pass him by in a blink, whole lengths of the borough disappearing when his eyes close. The voices grow louder, still indistinguishable from each other but by the time he reaches the Grand Army Plaza, the sound of it clangs around in his head like an echo chamber. The chaos of it fills him with strange, hopeful energy. He must be headed in the right direction. His heart constricts, and he knows it.

When he reaches the edge of the park though, he pauses as that uneasiness rises back up. By all accounts it’s daytime—if this place has a daytime; only time will tell—but the park is swallowed up by darkness. The trees cast long shadows, pitch black gouges across the street. The voices are so loud now, the chatter of a thick crowd, calling out to him. He has half a mind to dive off the car and go around the park instead, but how long would that take? How much time does he have? How long has he been here already? It feels like just minutes, but it could be days for all he can confirm.

The streetcar doesn’t slow, just trundles smoothly down the middle of Flatbush and into the park’s murk. It unsettles Steve, trying to distinguish between tree trunks in the thick darkness, remembering how many times he’s walked between them. It never looks like this in his mind’s eye—always bright and open, the leaves and the grass so inviting. As he thinks it, as he remembers playing hide-and-seek and an afternoon picnic with his mother, the dark seems to lift by a degree. Not totally, but as he watches, it turns to twilight and he can see deeper into the forest. The tree branches sway in a breeze he can’t feel, a siren-like draw, and Steve feels a smile begin at the corners of his lips.

Before he has time to consider leaping off the car to go explore, the voices break through again, louder and more distinct than ever. Steve jolts out of the seat and plants his palms against the glass, leaning forward till his nose presses against it too like some overeager kid. The car rolls out of the park and back into the the broad, soft glow of light from the sky. The voices crescendo, a crowd—cheering, Steve identifies, the words still unintelligible.

The streetcar banks hard to the left, jumping its tracks. Steve nearly loses his balance, both from the abrupt turn itself and the shock of it. He regains himself quickly, gripping the rail as he peers out the windows, trying to get his bearings. The car jerks left again, then right a block and a blink later, but Steve tightens his grip and stays steady this time. He catches sight of the street sign as they careen around the second corner: Sullivan Place. The crowd gives another almighty wail, and clarity settles warmly into his chest. He knows where he’s headed now.

The streetcar grinds to a creaking halt, its bells dinging cheerfully again as the doors open. And there it is, a place Steve thought he’d never see again except in grainy photographs, the site of more childhood memories and fantasies than he could ever piece together. Ebbets Field.

He shuffles down the stairs and off the car, sunk halfway down into a blissful haze. He hasn’t believed his eyes longer than a moment since he walked through that door, but this—he feels that phrase in the literal sense. He stares dumbstruck up at the resurrected stadium from the middle of the street. The color starts to seep slowly back into the bricks like blood flowing back into someone’s cheeks.

Then, like everything else, he notices something off. Nothing colossal or even particularly important, just details incongruous with his memory. The font on the stadium’s lettering is off, rounded where it should be squared. The awning’s stripes are too wide, and there are one too many panes in the windows above it.

As he thinks it, corrects it in his head, the image snaps into place in front of him like laying down puzzle pieces. The lettering, the stripes, and the window panes all correct themselves. In between blinks, everything shifts to look as it should. The crowd roars from within.

Steve walks toward the entrance, and the crowd keeps cheering as he passes through the doors, through the lobby, and into the halls that lead to the stands. He expects to find them filled, Dodgers in full swing against—who? He can’t remember checking the schedule recently, which isn’t like him. God, he hopes they’re pummeling the Giants to a pulp today. It’s been too long. He plunges down the ramp toward the section behind home plate. He’ll never know how in hell Buck managed to score these seats, and maybe it’s better he doesn’t ask, probably made a deal with death itself or spent half a month’s rent money.

The volume of the crowd builds to a fever pitch, so loud he can feel it physically pressing against him, and Steve nearly stumbles on the last few steps in his eagerness to see the packed stadium, his favorite team, and Bucky waiting for him with a smile and a box of cracker jack. He bounds off the last step, hangs a left—and jolts to a stop.

The stadium is empty, lifeless, quiet as a cemetery. No one’s here, not in the stands, the Dodgers aren’t on the field. Steve feels the nausea rise back up in him like a wave, threatening to bowl him over and send him stumbling to his knees. He shudders, overcome with a bone-deep chill, and holds out a hand to catch himself on the wall and keep from falling. He takes a moment to breathe, to steady himself, to wrap his head around the loss of that fantasy. It had felt so _real_ for just that fleeting instant, tangible as if he were living it. But he’s okay, he’s getting used to the feeling of having the rug pulled out from under his feet, knows now that he can handle it. How many times he can handle it—that’s a question he hopes never to find an answer to.

There’s no heartbeat to wait to settle. As soon as Steve feels solid enough to open his eyes and face it again, he does. His blinks awake to the desaturated stadium, the unoccupied seats, and the field devoid of any person, player, or fan.

Except—wait—that’s not right. It isn’t right, because there is someone there, standing on the pitcher’s mound.

Steve frowns, shielding his eyes out of habit more than necessity as he squints at the solitary figure. His feet carry him forward of their own volition, right up to the wall that divides stands and field. He plants his hands on the lip and leans forward, unsure how much he can trust his own eyes, but he would swear—he would _swear_ on his own soul—

The person spins on a heel to face Steve.

For the second time in his life, Steve feels his scowl fall away into a look of utter disbelief. His heart throws itself against his ribs, urging him forward almost violently.

“Bucky?”

From seventy feet away, Steve sees the brow pull down, the twitch of his mouth, and Steve prepares himself as much as he can for the repeat unraveling that answer will cause him.

But then his head cocks, and though his face still flickers with doubt, Bucky smiles hesitantly at Steve. He calls out, “Steve? Stevie, honey? Is that you?”

Steve’s heart thunders back to life, stuttering and then latching onto a breakneck rhythm, so loud he can hear it like the beat of a kick drum. It hurts at first, like trying to sprint on overworked legs, but the muscle warms up. The dull pain of it eases into a different ache that calls him forward. Steve vaults over the barrier, breaking into a wide, easy grin as he lopes toward the pitcher’s mound. Bucky still smiles tentatively at him, and his eyes are glassy, but Steve doesn’t notice the vague hesitation. All he can see is that blue, his eyes, so bright against the colorlessness of everything else that it’s electrifying. It sends a shock up his spine, through his nerves to the tips of his fingers and toes, his body waking up.

As Steve nears him, Bucky blinks once, a brief flutter of his eyelashes. The haziness in his eyes clears, and then that smile blooms across his face, all teeth and a tease of tongue between. Steve’s heart roars in his chest. They collide, Steve slamming into Bucky so hard that they spin with the force of it, arms locked around each other. Bucky holds him tight to his chest till they get their balance back, and his laughter echoes like church bells in the cathedral of the empty stadium.

Steve laughs too as Bucky takes his hand and uses their momentum to spin Steve out in a dance. Tilting his head back to look at him, Steve sees Bucky overflowing with joy, so filled to the brim it’s spilling out of his very pores. Steve feels surrounded by it, swaddled and warm, and then Bucky reels him back in and wraps his arms around Steve’s narrow shoulders in a fierce embrace. Steve winds his own arms around Bucky’s waist, holding him, his cheek laid tenderly against Bucky’s chest. With his ear lying against his sternum, Steve can hear the booming beat of Bucky’s heart.

Bucky presses a lingering kiss into Steve’s hair, nuzzling his face against Steve’s scalp. When he sighs contentedly, it stirs up Steve’s hair so that it falls into his eyes. Steve pulls back a fraction and frees a hand to tuck it back into place. When Bucky reaches up to cup his jaw, Steve leans back farther to look up at him. Bucky smiles down at him, soft as silk, his fingers warm against the skin of Steve’s face. Steve smiles back.

A beat later, his mouth twists hard into a frown.

“What?” Bucky asks concernedly, his breath ghosting across Steve’s forehead.

“You’re tall,” Steve says. He knows there’s something he’s not putting together, something not quite right, but he can’t see past Bucky right in front of him to figure it out. His brain blares out a triumphant siren, blocking out nearly every other thought.

Bucky snorts at him. His eyes crinkle at the corners, amused. “Yeah, and you’re short. It ain’t breaking news.”

Steve sways a step back, hands flying up to grip at Bucky’s shoulders when he tries to follow after. He takes another, until he can get a proper look. He drops his hands as the breath punches out of him.

“What?” Bucky asks again. He cocks his head, and his smile turns playful. “Don’t I look good?”

He does look good. He looks just the way Steve remembers—the way he remembers Bucky his friend, not the sergeant, not the assassin. He looks like himself, and it wrenches at Steve’s insides in a way he doesn’t fully understand. The high waist of his trousers with a shiny leather belt cinched tight, the wide collar of the shirt tucked in and the loosened knot of his tie, the suspenders and even his shoes—oxfords, polished to a high shine. Bucky always did take such care with his shoes. His hair is short and parted neatly down the left side. Steve leans back toward him an inch and drags in a long, deep breath.  That same cheap cologne he always picks up at the drugstore, the aftershave underneath it. The cigarettes, and something else—his skin, just him.

Steve’s mouth goes dry with longing. His brain still belts out a chorus of _Touch him_ . But some small corner, some part of himself that’s holding onto rationality, stutters out a faint warning. It’s the borough all over again. _Don’t be fooled._

But he can’t set the image in his mind of Bucky as he last saw him. It won’t take, jumps out and away from him like a parachuter out of an airplane, and then it’s gone. He blinks frantically and looks up to Bucky again, who frowns down at him.

“Steve?”

Up. Down. _You’re tall. You’re short_.

Steve jerks his head down to look at himself so quickly his neck pops in protest. He sees the pants, can feel the suspenders digging into the crest of his shoulders. He kicks a toe out, and there are the shoes, scuffed and dull like always. His hands fly up to his chest. He pats at it, feeling the bones of his sternum, sliding down to his ribs and the sharp jut of his hipbones at his slim waist. Then his hands are on his check, feeling the narrow jaw, the nose that’s just a little too big for the rest of him, pulling at the hair that always need trimming.

Bucky grabs at his wrists and holds them still even as Steve tries to wrench himself free. Jesus, but he did not miss Bucky being this much stronger than him.

“Hey, hey, calm down,” Bucky coaxes, ducking his head to catch Steve’s eye.

Steve looks into his eyes for a long moment, and his breath slows. The panic tempers into a firm resolve. He stops trying to tear away, and instead twists in Bucky’s grip to grab Bucky’s wrists and pull him forward. Bucky goes willingly enough, that crooked smile turning up again.

In the face of him, Steve forgets to back away as Bucky leans in toward him. He rises onto the balls of his feet to meet him halfway.

As their lips touch, Steve thinks—who could blame him? He can let himself have this, a single moment to bask in the glory of their reunion rather than panic over its context. It’s been such a long time since he had this, Bucky’s hands on his waist and his own sliding up Bucky’s arms to grip at his shirt collar. Bucky kisses him tenderly, and Steve kisses him back just as sweet and slow, savoring the taste of him like a piece of rock candy he spent all day scrounging up change to buy. He’ll relish it till the very last sugar granule has dissolved on his tongue.

Bucky pulls back first. Steve chases after his mouth, but Bucky just chuckles and gives his hip a squeeze. He leans out of reach, and that’s not fair, Steve craning on his tiptoes. But Bucky gazes down at him, so full of delight it’s almost reverent. Out of the corner of his eye, Steve can see the field starting to regain its color, vibrant green spreading out from the mound. But he only has eyes for Bucky, and as he stares back, he remembers why he’s here at all.

“Come on.” Steve drops his hands to grab one of Bucky’s. He spins around and sets off toward home plate, dragging Bucky along behind him. The whole field is green now, color seeping into the stands too. “I have to get you out of here. We have to go home.”

“Home?” Bucky asks, and he must have dug his feet in because suddenly Steve is jerked to a halt. He turns to find Bucky staring incredulously at him. “But you only just got here, Steve.”

“I know, but we have to go now.” He gives Bucky’s hand a firm yank.

Bucky’s face falls, those blue eyes anguished under a heavy brow. “But I’ve been waiting here for you for so long.”

It pulls at Steve’s heart, still thumping away in his chest, to see him like that. He takes a step closer, hand squeezing comfortingly at Bucky’s. “I know, and I appreciate it. But I gotta get you home,” he repeats.

“You don’t wanna see the game? We’ve been waiting for this game our whole lives. You don’t wanna even watch the first inning before we go?”

“Bucky,” Steve starts, glancing around them. The stadium is in full technicolor now, nearly oversaturated or maybe his eyes just haven’t adjusted to it. The sky is turning a rich shade of turquoise above them, cloudless and smooth. “Bucky, there’s no game today.”

“Sure there is,” Bucky says, tugging on his hand and pouting like a petulant child.

“No,” Steve insists. “Look around, sugar. There’s no one here.”

Bucky listens, his head swiveling as he squints at the stands. A little frown puckers his mouth. “I …” He pauses and sucks in a sharp breath, turning back to Steve with wide, confused eyes. “I could’ve sworn this place was packed. Wasn’t it packed?”

“I thought so too,” Steve answers, nodding. “But it isn’t. There’s no game, and we need to get home before it’s too late. Before it gets too late.”

“Okay,” Bucky answers meekly. This time, when Steve pulls at his hand, he follows along easily. He keeps hold of him though, like he’s a tether. Steve feels like one or both of them might go spiralling off into the ether if he loosens his grip.

They make it outside the stadium, where the street has come alive with color. It’s silent still, but a light breeze tugs at Steve’s baggy shirtsleeves. The streetcar sits exactly where he left it, and he hurries Bucky toward it. The doors fold open of their own accord, which Bucky doesn’t seem to notice as he climbs up the stairs after Steve.

“Hey, do you think I could have the window seat?” Bucky asks as he follows Steve up the aisle.

“Sure.” Steve gestures to the third row back. Bucky smiles cheerily at him, slipping his hand free to slide into the seat.

Steve panics for the instant when they’re unconnected, his heart stuttering. He falls into the aisle seat and gets his hands back on Bucky, one on his thigh and the other gripping his shoulder tightly. Touching him, feeling the warm solidity of his bones and muscles underneath his fingers and palms, brings him back down from the ledge. He feels so real, so right. He can’t be fake too. Steve has a sharp memory, sharper than most with an eye for detail, but there’s no way his mind would get that sly sideways look Bucky gives him correctly. The slight tilt of the head, the way his jaw twitches and his eyes dance as he smirks down at Steve’s hand on his thigh—it’s too perfect an imitation to be anything but real.

It’s him. It has to be. This is Bucky, sitting beside him on this streetcar. If he knows anything at all, he knows him. If nothing else here is real, at least Bucky is. That’s the only part of this that truly matters.

When Bucky shrugs Steve’s hand off his shoulder, Steve lets him. And when Bucky slings his arm around Steve’s own shoulders, he lets him do that too. He settles comfortably into his side, leaning into him, and lets himself have this. They are going home, and they’re going together. Everything else is a question—the where, the why, the how—but they are not, so Steve doesn’t question it. It feels too good to be here, snuggled against Bucky like nothing at all has changed, to bother looking at it too closely right now. He can do that later.

The car creaks into gear, turning around to rumble back toward the park. They roll back up Flatbush at a steady pace, the greenery around them _green_ now, the way it’s supposed to be. The park unfolds on either side of the street, verdant and inviting as it always was when they would go there together. Maybe they can come back down and have a picnic later, tomorrow or the next day. That would be a nice afternoon, tucked in the shade of the trees with a ham sandwich and a crisp apple, or maybe a pomegranate. Maybe they could scrape enough change together to buy a few sodas or some ice creams too, really make a day of it.

Soon the park’s behind them though, and Steve burrows closer into Bucky’s side as the buildings loom out of the hazy gray mist. He closes his eyes for just a moment, and Bucky rubs at his shoulder tenderly. He’ll just rest for a few moments, and then he’ll wake up and get them out of here. Yes, just a few minutes. It’s been too long since he’s slept properly.

“Steve? Hey, Steve, wake up. We’re home.” Bucky kisses his forehead, cupping his chin to lift his head till Steve’s eyes flicker open and he can hold it up himself.

“Home?”

“Yeah, honey,” Bucky laughs. “Didn’t you wanna go home? Come on.”

Bucky shifts Steve off of him and stands, sliding past him into the aisle. He holds out a hand, and Steve takes it, letting Bucky haul him to his feet and lead him off the trolley. His feet hit the pavement, and then he glances up and—

“Bucky.”

“What?”

“The streetcar doesn’t run here.”

Here—home. The middle of their street, in the middle of Brooklyn Heights. But they shouldn’t be here—shouldn’t be tumbling off the car directly in front of their building. The stop is several blocks over, they always had to walk a ways to get home, there’s no line on this street.

Steve turns to Bucky with wide eyes to find Bucky staring back at him, frowning. He glances between the streetcar and the building, and his frown deepens. Steve waits for him to get it, for the details to click, but then Bucky blinks.

His face clears, and he shakes his head at Steve, smiling. “‘Course it doesn’t. I wish they’d run a line out here so I didn’t have to drag your sorry ass home all the way from our stop though.”

A quick glance over his shoulder confirms what Steve already knew: the streetcar has disappeared. He shoots a hand out and grabs Bucky by the wrist, yanking him roughly down the block.

“Come on,” he commands.

Bucky trips after him for a few steps before planting his feet. Steve jolts to a stop again, his shoulder wrenching painfully. He spins on Bucky in a desperate fury, grabbing at his shirt and tugging so hard the seams start to split

“Come on! We have to go!” he yells.

“We just got home,” Bucky says. “You said you wanted to come home, and here we are.”

“No, no, we have to go! This isn’t right,” Steve begs him to understand, staring up into Bucky’s confused face. Hot, angry tears well up in his own eyes, and Bucky’s frown only deepens.

“Why are you always trying to run off somewhere else? Can’t we just go inside for a bit?” Bucky lays a hand over one of Steve’s still knotted in his shirt, rubbing soothing circles into his white knuckle grip. “I’ve missed you.”

The tears spill over then, a heavy sob tearing through Steve’s chest. He thumps his head against Bucky’s chest, grip impossibly tighter in the soft fabric.

“Hey, hey,” Bucky coos, stroking his free hand against Steve’s back. “Steve, hey, let’s just go inside for a bit and get you calmed down. If you can calm down for me, then we can go anywhere you want to, alright? I promise.”

“Okay,” Steve croaks. He doesn’t know what else he can do but agree. It might be nice, to see their old place again, just for a few minutes. Then they’ll go. As Bucky pries Steve from his chest, Steve feels for the key in his pocket. Through the fabric of his pants, he can still feel the cold heat of it, and it comforts him. He has the key, he found him, they have time—everything’s okay.

Bucky guides him toward the door to their building, one arm still slung around his shoulders even as they ease inside and start the slow shamble up the stairs. Steve grips the rail out of habit, hauling himself up as patiently as he can manage. On the third landing, he pauses like usual.

“Good?” Bucky asks, same as he always does when Steve stops to catch his breath in this same spot.

Only this time, when Steve nods, he means it. His lungs don’t ache at all. His breath still flows in and out painlessly. “Yeah, I’m good.”

“Come on, we’re in the home stretch,” Bucky says, coaxing Steve up the last flight. There’s their door, right at the top of the stairs. The brass number, the tiny dent in the handle, the dusty blue light fixture lighting the hallway. Bucky pulls his key from his pocket, slipping his arm free to unlock the door. He holds it open, turning to Steve with a grin and broad sweep of the hand.

“Welcome home.”

Steve returns his smile despite the vague dread coiling in the pit of his stomach, a snake ready to strike at any moment. He trails past Bucky into the apartment, holding his breath for the mistakes, the flawed rendering. He knows it’s here that it will hurt more than anywhere else to see it done up wrong—this place that was theirs together, where they could love each fiercely without regard for what was beyond that locked front door.

As he steps over the threshold and the place comes into view, it’s perfect.

The kitchenette on the left, the tiny two-seater table providing the only border between it and the living room. There’s the couch, that rough green fabric that always smells faintly of tobacco even though Bucky never smokes in the apartment. The windows with the curtains Bucky’s ma passed along to them. The coffee table, a mug left sitting out on it, and the radio and Victrola in the corner. The bookshelf that’s overrun with Bucky’s record collection.

And then there’s the door on the left side of the room, the one that leads to the bedroom and the two twin beds layered in quilts Steve had inherited from his mother. They were stitched in Ireland, she told him once, by her own mother—his grandmother whom he never met.

It needs dusting, like always. It smells like potatoes and the incense their downstairs neighbor burns. Their beds probably aren’t made, and someone—Steve, it’s always Steve who does it—left his shoes on the living room floor.

It’s messy. It’s perfect. It’s home.

Steve can’t believe his own eyes. He wants to, but they’ve been lying to him for some time now.

“Steve?” He hears the door shut behind him, and then suddenly Bucky’s in front of him, laying hands on his shoulders, forehead, chest, and neck in quick succession. “What’s wrong?”

Steve looks up at him, his vision swimming till Bucky is a blur of earthtones before him. Then everything snaps into sharp focus. He sees Bucky’s pinched brow, his parted hair, and beyond him their goddamn apartment, plucked right out of his memories and realized in perfect detail. He’s thought about this place so many times since they lived here, always wondering what he would do if he had the chance to go back, to live their lives as if war and science and fate had never intervened. It was always a pipe dream, a lonely thing to dwell on on long, quiet nights—unattainable, impossible, and dangerous.

Now here it is, dropped into his lap like a gift on Christmas morning. Maybe the wrapping isn’t quite right, the bow off center or the edges crinkled—but that never bothered him before. He was always happy to get a gift at all.

If this is a gift then, shouldn’t he take and it and be grateful? That’s what he was always taught. When someone gives you a gift, you take it, and you say thank you. That’s all there is to it.

The first laugh bubbles up out of him, more a snort than anything else. Then he’s laughing, guffawing, slumping forward so that Bucky’s grip on his shaking shoulders is the only thing keeping him upright. He knows that it’s hysterics, some sort of delayed panic reaction, but he can’t stop. His whole body rattles with the force of it.

“Jesus, Steve,” Bucky gasps, gripping at his upper arms. “I think you oughta lie down, pal. Come on.”

Steve lets Bucky haul him forward, his fingers tangled in the straps of Bucky’s suspenders as he leans his weight on him. Bucky kicks the bedroom door open and drags him over to his bed. He lays him down gently, easing him onto the mattress and making sure his head rests on the pillow. Bucky pulls his shoes off and tucks the loose blankets around him tightly, swaddling him. The hysteria starts to ebb as Bucky crouches by his bedside, holding Steve’s hand tightly in both of his own.

“Better?” Bucky asks. Steve nods, and as the frenzy falls away, exhaustion washes over him to replace it. His eyelids droop. “How ‘bout you take a nap for me?”

Steve nods again, and Bucky smiles at him as he straightens up. When he tries to pull his hands away, Steve latches on and holds him in place.

“Will you stay here with me?” Steve asks softly, already on the edge of sleep.

Bucky meets his eyes, and the wrinkle in his brow is only there for an instant before it smooths away. He toes off his shoes, and Steve releases his hands so he can flick his suspenders off his shoulders. Bucky crawls over him to tuck into the space between the wall and Steve’s body. He loops an arm around Steve’s waist and hooks his chin over Steve’s shoulder, close while still giving him room enough to breathe. Steve lays his hand over Bucky’s where his fingers curl around his hipbone. He falls asleep with Bucky’s breath puffing against his neck.

He doesn’t dream at all.


	3. Chapter 3

He comes to slowly, like an easy morning when there’s nowhere to be and no real reason to wake up. He’s warm and comfortable, well-rested like he hasn’t been in a long time. His body doesn’t ache or beg him to roll over and go back to sleep. It takes him a long minute to place why.

He feels a familiar hand stroking at his side, another body snug against his side. “You finally awake?”

Steve huffs a noncommittal answer, rolling over to nestle into Bucky. Pressed so close, it shakes him too when Bucky laughs. “I’ll take that as a no then.”

“‘M awake,” Steve mumbles. He yawns so wide his jaw creaks, smacking his lips. Bucky strokes at his hair, and he presses up into the touch. He wriggles closer till his weight forces Bucky to topple onto his back. Steve promptly crawls on top of him and rests his head over Bucky’s heart. He closes his eyes to focus on the steady beat beneath him, thumping in perfect synchronicity with his own. 

“You don’t have to wake up yet if you don’t want to,” Bucky murmurs.

“I said I’m awake,” Steve says, but his voice is still sleep-slurred.

“I’ll believe it when I see it.”

Steve sighs and lifts himself up on his arms, enough that he can give Bucky the stink eye. “I’m awake, see?”

“Okay, grumpy gus. No need to bite my head off.” Bucky holds his hands up in surrender before dropping them onto the pillow above his head, open and inviting. 

“How long was I out?” Steve asks.

“Couple hours, I think.”

“Did you sleep at all?”

“Nah,” Bucky says, and Steve opens his mouth to protest, to tell him he could have gotten up or something, but Bucky snakes a hand between them to lay a finger over Steve’s lips. “Hey, did I say I minded? You’re cute when you’re asleep and all docile for once in your life.”

Steve tries to sink his teeth into the pad of Bucky’s finger, but there’s not enough meat on the bone to get a grip. Bucky jerks his hand away, swatting at the back of Steve’s head.

“That’s what I’m talking about! Stop trying to bite me, you numskull,” Bucky says, but there’s no real punch behind it. He’s smiling too broadly, happy to have his point proven. 

“Never heard you complain about it before,” Steve reminds him.

Bucky rolls his eyes. “Different situations.”

“Sure, sure,” Steve says. For a moment they just smile at each other, silly and saccharine, but Steve doesn’t mind that. Bucky’s tongue darts out to lick his lower lip, and Steve follows the movement raptly. When his tongue disappears again, Steve surges forward to chase after it. But Bucky lurches up at the same time, and they collide with clacking teeth and bumping noses.

“Ow, shit!” Steve wobbles on one arm, his free hand checking for blood on his lip where it caught between his teeth and Bucky’s. He pulls his fingers away and looks, but they’re clean. He glances down at Bucky, who’s rubbing at his nose and biting back a laugh.

“You okay?” Steve asks.

“Yeah,” Bucky says, and he reaches up to cup Steve’s jaw. “Now let’s try that again.”

Bucky coaxes him down, and as Steve leans forward, the bed springs whine under their shifting weight. He starts out easy this time, smacking a tease of a kiss against Bucky’s lips, then another and another until Bucky huffs and slides his hand around to grip Steve’s neck and haul him in. Even then they’re both too busy smiling for it to be much of a kiss, just a dry slide of their lips together, but Bucky relaxes with a quiet sigh, and Steve follows him under.

Bucky’s hands slide up and down his back like he can’t decide where he wants to grip as Steve deepens the kiss. Steve is wild with it now, intoxicated on the taste of him. He can’t blame Bucky for needing something to hold onto as Steve nips at his lower lip. He shifts till he’s straddling Bucky’s waist, spine curled as he licks into his mouth, hands tangled in Bucky’s hair. Bucky moans beneath him, and the sound of it is so sweet, lovely like nothing else he’s ever heard. He wants to hear it again and again till the whole room’s filled with it, till it’s the only sound in his ears.

He gets a hand on Bucky’s belt and undoes the buckle with a practiced flick. He slides down the zipper and murmurs, “Is this okay?” even as he eases a hand under Bucky’s waistband.

“Is this  _ okay _ , he asks,” Bucky rumbles, and Steve laughs into his neck. He gets his hands on Bucky properly then, pulling his dick out of his drawers. Bucky, helpful as always, drops his hands from Steve’s hips to push his slacks down to mid-thigh. Steve takes full advantage of the better access as he shimmies down the bed. He rucks Bucky’s shirt up to press kisses into the sensitive skin of his abdomen. Bucky twitches and bats his head away playfully when Steve lingers over the ticklish spot at his hip. 

It goes much too quickly after that, but Steve can only blame himself for it. Each time he hollows his cheeks, Bucky makes that delicious sound again, music to his ears. Steve doesn’t linger or tease, only too happy to give Bucky what he wants. Bucky knots one hand in the sheets, the other in Steve’s hair as he babbles encouragement. 

When he comes, it takes them both by surprise, no warning or build-up at all. Bucky cries out, and Steve sucks him down with relish, his hands digging into Bucky’s hips hard enough for his nails to catch and leave marks. Bucky sinks back into the mattress with a tremulous sigh, loosening his grip in Steve’s hair to pat his cheek, coaxing him off his spent cock. Steve releases him reluctantly and wipes his chin. Bucky pulls at his shirt collar weakly till Steve gets the idea and crawls forward to curl against Bucky’s side.

“Give me two minutes and then I’ll take care of you,” Bucky pants. “Holy shit, Steve.”

Steve muffles his laugh against Bucky’s chest, still heaving with labored breaths. “Take your time.”

“What do you want?”

“Whatever you wanna give me.”

“What, no six-step strategy with alternate maneuvers in place?” Bucky jokes. Steve scoffs and thumps a loose fist into Bucky’s ribs. “Alright, let’s get this show on the road.”

“Gee, what a way to charm a fella, Buck.”

“You’ll be downright delighted,” Bucky says. With one fluid move, suddenly Steve finds himself pinned beneath Bucky. He growls, “Just you wait.”

Bucky hovers over him, and the light of the lamp casts his face into sharp relief. With Bucky’s legs bracketing his hips and one hand pinning his shoulder to the bed, he’s trapped beneath him. Bucky’s grin fades into a determined line, his eyes narrowing to dark points, the blue barely visible in the low light—sinister— _ dangerous _ —burning holes into him— 

The memory comes, cold syrupy thick like a ghost passing through him. Pain tears into his gut, his face hot. A different but no less torturous ache seizes his heart, slamming around inside him like the most pitiful bird in a cage, scared and hurting but resolved to set itself free no matter the cost.

Steve shudders, a full body tremor. He squeezes his eyes shut and caves in on himself, curling around the brightest point of anguish at the center of him. He can hear Bucky’s voice, rising in pitch and fervor. The hands trying to hold him singe his skin. He can see it, just barely, though something tries to block it out and shove it away—not his mind, something else, a river trying to drown the memory till it sinks to the murky bottom. He can hear it rushing in his ears. He gets hold of the image in his head, grasps it tight to his chest, and hauls himself to the bank.

He sees it properly then. Bucky looming over him, a desperate edge to the hard set of his jaw. Sunlight glints off the metal of his fist where it’s pulled back, poised to strike. Steve hears himself say something. The memory ends as Bucky’s expression morphs into one of appalled comprehension.

Everything clicks back into place, and Steve understands where he is.

He takes a deep breath and opens his eyes. Bucky hovers over him, eyes wide and lips parted around a question he can’t find the words to ask. His hands on Steve are soft and reassuring, rubbing his arms and shoulders as he calms. 

“Steve?” Bucky asks softly. “Can you hear me?”

“Yeah,” Steve wheezes. “I can hear you, Bucky.”

Bucky nods, but his face is still pinched with worry. “I’m gonna get you some water. Then I need you to try to explain what just happened.”

Bucky slides off him and onto the floor, fastening his pants and belt again. His eyes linger on Steve and his too-quick breathing. Steve smiles weakly at him, and he finally turns and pads out of the room.

While he’s gone, Steve lets his eyes slip closed again, one hand resting over his chest. His heart thrums beneath his fingers. Tentatively, he prods at the memory again, just the edges of it in case it tries to drag him back down into that vortex. But it comes easily this time, the whole of it and not just the single flashing image. The context doesn’t make it any less painful, but it makes it easier to understand.

Knowing that Bucky is just in the other room, pouring a glass of water for him—it doesn’t heal the hurt of it, but it’s a cooling salve. Bucky is here, and he knows Steve. It’s okay.

Bucky shuffles back into the room with two glasses in hand. Steve shifts up the bed till he’s propped against the headboard, dragging the quilt up with him and tucking it around his waist. Bucky hands him a glass and sets the second on the nightstand before perching at the foot of the bed. Steve gulps down the first glass in one go and sets it down. He reaches for the second and holds it out to Bucky, who just shakes his head.

“No, that one’s for you too.”

“Thanks,” Steve says, holding it close to him. He stares down at the the water in the glass, the way it refracts the light of the lamp, shivering when his hand twitches. He feels Bucky’s eyes on him.

“Steve,” Bucky says.

Steve glances up and meets his eyes. “Bucky.”

Bucky’s mouth twists sharply into a frown, his eyes serious. Steve says, “Sorry, it just—I remembered the last time you were over me like that, on the helicarrier. It—I guess I got freaked out. I don’t really know.”

Bucky’s frown smooths out into blank confusion.

“I think I’m okay now though,” Steve says. “I know you wouldn’t do anything like that now. I know you didn’t mean it then either. It’s okay.”

Steve takes a sip of his water, and Bucky cocks his head to one side, frowning again. “Helicarrier?”

Steve swallows his sip. “Yeah, the—when we fought. Project Insight? HYDRA?”

“What’s a HYDRA?”

Steve’s stomach drops to the floor. Does he not—maybe he doesn’t remember any of that, addled as his brain had been. But Steve had thought he’d broken through to him, or had come close to it anyway. But then—Bucky knows what HYDRA is. He knows that. He would never forget that.

“Bucky,” Steve says slowly, setting down his water. “Where are we right now?”

Bucky squints at him, casting his eyes around the room like it’s obvious. “We’re at home, Steve.”

“Are we? Our real home in Brooklyn?”

“Where else would we be?” Bucky says, voice wavering. “You’re scaring me a little. What’s wrong? Where do you think we are?”

“What year is it?” The fear rises up the back of Steve’s throat like flood water.

“Gee, did you hit your head or something? Is that why you’re acting so funny?”

“Bucky, what year do you think it is?” 

“It’s 1940, of course.”

Steve gasps and gapes at him, his mind gone blank with shock. Bucky smiles encouragement at him, but the longer Steve stares back dazedly, the more befuddled Bucky becomes.

“Steve?”

“The war,” Steve breathes.

“Yeah, what about it?” Bucky asks.

“You don’t—you don’t remember it.”

“Of course I remember it. It’s happening right now, isn’t it?”

Steve shakes his head, his breath quickening. “But you don’t remember fighting in it.”

“America’s not in the war yet,” Bucky says, eyes wide. 

“What about me?” Steve presses, voice sweeping high and raw. “Captain America? Do you remember the Howlies—Howard? Peggy?”

Bucky just shakes his head minutely, body stiff with fright. Steve launches himself across the bed at him, gripping at his shirt, laying hands on him like touching him might transfer the knowledge, the clarity Steve has that Bucky doesn’t—he doesn’t  _ know— _

“What about the train? Do you remember falling? And this—” Steve grabs Bucky’s left arm, yanks it from where it’s tucked against his side so he can peer at it. “It’s metal now, do you remember that? What they did to you? And when we fought, when you tried to stop me and you shot me and then you saved me anyway—but then I …”

Steve pauses, struck with guilt. This is his fault. Death told him so.

“Steve, what the fuck are you talking about? Jesus, get the hell off me!” Bucky roars, and his panic makes him rough when he shoves Steve away. Steve hits the wall with a huff as Bucky clambers off the bed and paces to the corner. 

Steve slumps against the wall as he tries to wrap his head around impossibilities again. Surely one person shouldn’t have to comprehend so many incomprehensible things in their lifetime, but here he is again, trying to reassemble the reality in front of him into something he can understand.

It makes sense when he considers it—that Bucky doesn’t remember. All the signs had been there since he’d found him on the field. Only Steve hadn’t bothered to look at what was standing right in front of him—literally right in front of him, Bucky in his suspenders and shiny shoes, that bright gleam in his eye. He hasn’t seen him like that in such a long time. He thought he’d never see him like that again, and he’d been so overjoyed to have him back, to have him in his arms again, he hadn’t paused to parse out the details.

He glances up to see Bucky in the corner of the room. He stands tall and defensive, so utterly still Steve might think he were a statue if he didn’t know better. His eyes are hard, all calculated weariness as he stares holes into Steve.

Steve had never seen Bucky look like that before he found him in Azzano—had rarely known him to be anything other than animated until the first time Steve saw him with a sniper rifle in his hands. That deliberate calm is still so eery to him, even more than it used to be, but it means one thing.

The rest of him is still in there somewhere.

Where though? And the more important question: why? Steve remembers. His grip on it may be tenuous, but he knows how he got here and what he came here to do. He remembers the series of events that brought them to this point, that it’s his fault Bucky is here at all, that there’s no real way he could have prevented it but he knows that there is a way he can set it to right. He made it here.

Now he’s not so sure that making it out is a possibility.

Why doesn’t Bucky remember, if Steve does? It may be something to do with what HYDRA did to him. Maybe they didn’t just stifle his memories—maybe they’re gone, expunged from his head like there were never there at all. This might be all that he has left, all that he can access.

It could be, though, that it’s something to do with this place. This dimension has been trying to hijack Steve’s head from the moment he walked through that door. He’s fought it off so far, but it could be that Bucky didn’t fare so well. Without Steve there to remind him why he should, someone to ground him so he could keep his head together, he may have slipped under.

“Bucky?” Steve asks, holding out his hand as a peace offering. 

Bucky’s rigid posture relaxes, but he still eyes Steve hesitantly. “You done thrashing me around and spouting nonsense now?”

“Am I ever done doing that?” Steve slips off the bed and lifts both hands now, open and calm as he can manage with a thousand complicated thoughts cluttering his brain. He can’t figure this out with Bucky looking at him like that.

“No, guess not,” Bucky says around a soft smile. He eases forward into Steve’s embrace, wrapping his arm around Steve’s shoulders and sighing out a last bit of tension. Steve, for his part, manages to stay loose as he slips his arms around Bucky’s waist and holds him close. This is still Bucky in his arms, no matter what he does or doesn’t remember, and that’s the most important facet of this. 

“Sorry if I scared you,” he says, turning his head to press a kiss over Bucky’s heart. “Are you okay?”

“Am I okay?” Bucky parrots, leaning back so he can look at Steve. He raises his eyebrows. “Are you?”

“I am,” Steve assures him. Bucky frowns skeptically. Steve squeezes his ribs and repeats, “I am, honest.”

“If you say so,” Bucky mutters, seeing right through him like always. Steve finds it oddly comforting even as he worries how to hide his distress—if he should at all. “I’m gonna get dinner started. How about you come sit on the couch?”

It’s so predictable Steve could laugh, Bucky wanting to keep an eye on him after a fit like that. The familiarity of it settles over him like a warm blanket, soft and snug. At least he can have this while he figures out what to do with this newfound knowledge, how it complicates their situation. Bucky leads him to the couch, and Steve doesn’t let him fuss too much, batting him away when he tries to fluff the cushions with exaggerated care. Laughing, Bucky traipses over to the kitchen and starts pulling open cabinets.

It’s a rare treat to have Bucky making dinner. He’s always been the better cook, helping his mother in the kitchen since he was old enough to see over the counter. Steve was usually the one home in time to cook though, so they were stuck with his paltry offerings for evening meals more often than not.

Steve lies back on the couch while Bucky whirls around the kitchen, clanging pans and slicing up fresh vegetables with deft strokes. Steve watches him cook, and he thinks.

 

Dinner is inexplicably wonderful: hearty chicken soup and a warm hunk of bread. When Steve asks Bucky where it came from, he shrugs and says that everything was in the cabinets and the ice box, right there for the taking. Steve chalks it up as another strange detail of this world, though this is one he’s not particularly fussed about. It’s damn good soup.

Bucky puts on a record while they wash up, something cheery. Steve can’t place the name of the song, but he wiggles his hips to the beat while he puts the dishes away. Bucky breaks away from drying duty to show him up with some fancy footwork, less impressive in socks. He trills a laugh when Steve grabs the dish rag from his shoulder and pops him on the hip with it.

“Alright, hot shot, go put on your dancing shoes,” Steve tells him as he clicks the cabinet shut. “You promised me earlier you’d go wherever I want. Let’s take a walk.”

“I’m nothing if not a man of my word.” Bucky tips him a salute before he scurries off to the bedroom. Steve finds his shoes in the living room, identical to the the pair on the bedroom floor, and slips them on. He straightens his shirt out, tucking it back into his trousers.

Bucky comes back through the door, soles tapping against the hardwood. He holds out Steve’s shoes to him, but Steve raises an eyebrow and glances at his feet. Bucky follows his gaze, down to the simple brown leather, a big scuff on the right toe in the exact same spot.

“Don’t you only have the one pair?” Bucky wonders. He holds up the shoes in his hand and squints at them. He blinks, but there they still are in his hand.

Steve nods slowly. “Yeah, Buck. I’ve only got one pair of shoes.” 

“Huh,” Bucky huffs. He sets the shoes down on the coffee table gingerly, like he’s worried they might explode. “That’s weird.”

“It is,” Steve agrees. He holds out his hand, and Bucky lifts him up to standing. “Let’s go.”

Bucky follows him into the hall, neither of them bothering to lock the door behind them. When they reach the street, it’s still quiet and empty. There’s no sun to set, but the bright color of the sky is starting to fade into a subdued shade of twilight purple. No light pours from any windows, but a few street lamps cast a pale glow over the shady street. Steve grabs Bucky by the hand and leads him east.

As they walk through their neighborhood, Steve looks for the inconsistencies, the things that don’t line up. They’re few and far between though—a brownstone with brick that’s a shade too dark, a street sign that’s too short. Each time he spots a mistake, it’s gone as soon as he notices it. Bucky walks sedately beside him, unaware of Steve’s occasional flares of frustration.

Soon they reach where Steve was headed, much sooner than they ought to have gotten there. Steve can see it scaling high above the buildings to the west, cutting out a dark shape against the lavender sky. Anticipation sends him hurrying forward, pulling at Bucky’s hand till he’s nearly running toward the walkway that will take them onto the bridge, back to that silvery door and out, back to where everything is real.

On the last block of Tillary Street, hope flares in his chest like a flame catching, lighting him up from the inside out. It burns everything else away, his world narrowed down to that place in the center of the Brooklyn Bridge where he knows the door waits for them, the key in his pocket and Bucky’s warm hand in his own. He runs, and Bucky follows behind him

“Steve?” Bucky calls out as they approach the walkway’s entrance.

“We’re almost there!” Steve cheers over his shoulder. 

“Steve!” Bucky shouts, catching up to his side and pushing past him till he’s in front of him, cutting him off. Steve bowls into him, and Bucky stumbles backward under his weight before he rights them both. He grips Steve’s shoulders tight, eyes wild and worried as he catches his breath.

“What are you doing?” Steve tries to shove past him, toward the walkway that’s  _ right there _ , goddammit. They’re so close.

“What are  _ you _ doing?” Bucky demands.

“I’m trying to get us home, Bucky, just come on,” Steve says, shaking free of his tight hold and reaching for his hands again. Bucky jerks away and backs up several paces, crossing his arms over his stomach and holding onto his elbows.

“I don’t wanna go on the bridge,” he says.

“What? Why not?” That frenetic, hopeful energy twists inside him into something darker.

“I’m not going on the bridge,” Bucky asserts more firmly. Steve scowls at him, but Bucky just shoulders past him and turns back down the street. Steve follows after him.

“Buck! Bucky, hey, slow down a minute!” Bucky pauses outside a storefront to wait for him, bouncing from foot to foot. Steve reaches him, reaches for him, but Bucky shrugs his hands off. “Why won’t you go on the bridge? Come on, it’ll be good. I promise.”

“I don’t want to,” Bucky mutters. “I want to go home. Can’t we just go home?”

“That’s what I’m—” Steve starts, but that argument doesn’t work. Bucky doesn’t understand. To him, this is home. There is where they’re meant to be. For whatever reason, he doesn’t want to leave—somehow knows that if they cross that bridge, then that means leaving. Steve is familiar with that kind of inherent knowledge. 

He tries again. “You don’t wanna just walk across part of it? See the river?”

Bucky shakes his head, staring down at the ground and biting his lip.

“I really want to go on the bridge,” Steve insists.

“Then go without me.” Bucky glances up, and his face is anguished, lips trembling like he might cry. Steve’s breath catches in his chest. “Don’t make me go.”

“Hey.” Steve takes a step closer, and Bucky drops his gaze to the ground again. “Bucky, hey. It’s okay. Can you look at me for a minute, sugar?”

Steve ducks his head to meet his eyes, and it tugs strangely at his heart. He didn’t know he missed being short enough to do that. Bucky looks down at him, still cagey, but his hands don’t curl around his elbows quite so tightly. Steve lays one hand over Bucky’s forearm.

“I’m not going anywhere without you. And I’m not going to force you to go anywhere you don’t want to go,” Steve tells him. As he says it, he knows that he means it. This plan, to usher him across the bridge and out without warning or explanation—it won’t work. There’s something keeping Bucky here, something that’s making him want to stay. 

For Steve to be able to get them out, he’ll have to convince him that it’s the better option. But how can he do that, if Bucky doesn’t remember anything? If he doesn’t know?

When Steve thinks it explicitly for the first time, it scares him less than he would have expected it to.

How does he get them back to the other side of the door if Bucky doesn’t understand that they are dead?

That’s too big a question to answer right now though, with Bucky shivering in front of him like he forgot his coat in winter. His priority—the whole reason he’s here at all—is keeping Bucky safe. Right now, he needs to get him home, where he wants to be. He can trifle with the rest of it once Bucky is fine again. One thing at a time.

“We’ll go home,” Steve promises. “We will.”

Bucky sighs a shallow breath and drops his arms. “Good.”

When Steve takes his hand again, Bucky smiles at him. The edges of it are shaky, but Steve will take it. He smiles back as much as he can. Bucky sets off down the street again, heading in the direction of their apartment. Steve follows after him, tucked against Bucky’s side. He can try again, a different approach. He will get them out of here. It’s the same conviction he’s felt a thousand times over, thrumming in his chest and amplified by the synchronous beating of Bucky’s own heart. Steve can do this. They can do it together.

 

A few blocks of walking through their silent neighborhood, Steve isn’t so sure anymore.

No, it’s not that—he knows that he  _ can _ do this. It’s the matter of  _ how _ that has him stuck. He can see the other side, the goal of this whole ordeal, but between them and that end lies a yawning abyss of uncertainty. 

Steve might be able to coerce him, to compel Bucky to follow him across the bridge anyway. If Steve truly pleaded with him, he might give in. Bucky would, anyway—but maybe his will isn’t entirely his own. Whatever is holding him back is bigger than stubbornness.

Steve gives his hand the slightest squeeze, just enough to make Bucky look at him. He glances over and smiles weakly, his eyes tired. Steve smiles back and keeps walking.

He couldn’t do that in good faith. It would feel like kidnapping him, stealing him away when as far as Steve has evidence, all Bucky wants to do is stay right here. It wouldn’t be right to do that to him. Bucky’s had his hand forced far too many times in his life for Steve to ever consider doing that to him.

Then—what? What else can he do?

He can try to make Bucky see that this place isn’t what he thinks it is. He can point out the flaws, try to make him understand that this isn’t their Brooklyn, but some spectral likeness of it. He could start right now as they walk along— _ where’s the sun, Bucky? Don’t you notice how quiet it is?  _ Steve stops himself from tugging on Bucky’s sleeve though. That method might just unnerve him and do no real good, like the shoes. Scaring him isn’t productive.

There’s only one option, when it comes down to it: Bucky needs to understand why they have to leave. In order for this to happen, he must remember why they are here at all. That means one thing. That means Steve has to make him remember.

The weight of the revelation feels like a loaded gun in Steve’s hand, a powerful heaviness he’s not sure he wants to wield. More than that—he’s not sure that he has any right to hold that decision in his hands, to make that choice for Bucky. If he can force him into this either.

Because what he would be giving back to him—well, it isn’t really a gift at all, is it?

Steve studies Bucky’s profile in the fading light. His face is inscrutable.

He would want to know, if it were him. What’s happened to him—everything good, and all the wretched, painful, dark parts of his life too—are what make him who he is. He lived this life, and he wouldn’t choose to forget any of it, even the worst of it. Those experiences are his, a winding path that has brought Steve to where he is now, to this reckoning.

He doesn’t have to do it. He doesn’t, and there are a thousand reasons why he shouldn’t—seventy years worth of reasons why it is a terrible choice. They had good times during the war, it wasn’t all bad, but when it was bad, it was awful. Then what comes after that, what happened to Bucky next—Steve read the file, but he only knows the surface details. He has no idea the depth or scope of the atrocities committed against Bucky, so horrible it makes him sick to even consider it. What would it do to Bucky, to be made to remember that? Steve isn’t sure that the ends justify the means.

There are alternatives, other paths to take, if he wants them.

Leave without him. Not an option, not even for a moment. He would rather die.

Stay then, and let Bucky live in blissful ignorance of half his own life, while the dishonesty of it rots Steve away. A poor choice, but he would condemn himself to a disingenuous existence if it meant Bucky could be happy. He doesn’t know how long he could stomach it, but he could try.

Stay here and give into this world. It would be easy, like falling asleep after a backbreaking day of work. It wouldn’t take any effort at all, a walk to the river’s edge, slip in and come out fresh and enchanted. Then nothing at all would stand between him and an eternity with the man he loves, and isn’t that what he wants in the end? Isn’t Bucky what he wants above everything else?

Bucky’s hand is warm in his, and it’s so nice to touch him again. To walk through their neighborhood and hold onto him so openly. They couldn’t have that before. 

He looks away from their intertwined fingers and back up to the washed out colors of the empty street. Out of the corner of his eye, he watches Bucky, unaware of anything out of the ordinary.

It comes down to the same conclusion, that he would never want to forget like that, to forget himself like that. Not willingly, not now—he isn’t ready for it.

No, no. None of those choices are viable.

There is only one thing Steve can do then. He has to make Bucky see that this world isn’t theirs. He must make him remember.


	4. Chapter 4

He starts simple. Back at the apartment—and Steve can’t say he isn’t relieved to see it again, a stiffness in him loosening when he crosses that threshold—he heads straight for the kitchen. He has a faint inkling that he’s right about this, that if he wishes hard and opens the cabinet, he’ll see it. He grasps a knob and pulls—and yes, there it is.

He turns to Bucky, who dawdles in the living room like he’s not sure what to do with himself. With one hand on the box, he asks him, “Do you want a cup of tea?”

“Tea?” Bucky spins to face him with his eyebrows raised, mouth twisting as if he might laugh at Steve for suggesting it. Steve can’t blame him for that; they had both been such purists about it, turning their noses up at the barest mention of anything but a mug of strong black coffee. The war changed them so much, as wars are wont to do.

“Yeah, tea.” Steve sets the box of tea bags on the counter and goes to fill a pot with water. “I’m making a cup. Do you want some?”

Bucky frowns at him quizzically for a beat, but then he shrugs and flops onto the couch. Steve takes that as a yes and sets to getting two mugs ready while the water comes to a boil.

Once it’s steeped, Steve carries the mugs to the living room and hands one to Bucky as he eases down onto the couch beside him. This tea might do double duty, Steve thinks, as he wraps his hands firmly around the ceramic. It’s been a long day, and he’s learned about the soothing affect a warm cup in his hands can have, the way the drink heats him up from the inside and settles him.

He takes a sip, and it’s like being transported in time. Back to London, back to that day of leave when Peggy had found out he’d never had hot tea in his life. She’d dragged him by the elbow to a little tea room up the block, sat him down at a corner table, and wouldn’t let him leave till he’d found a kind he liked. He had drunk four cups, but truth be told he’d liked every one of them. 

This one though—this kind is still his favorite, the lapsang souchong. He’d started drinking it every chance he got, and after Bucky had tasted the smoky richness of it on Steve’s mouth, he had taken to it as well.

As Bucky sniffs at the steaming liquid, delicate hope flutters like moth’s wings in Steve’s heart. Steve takes a sip and smiles at Bucky over the rim of the mug, softly encouraging. Bucky puts his lips to the cup and tips it slightly. Steve watches his throat bob as he drinks. 

Then Bucky grimaces and leans forward to set the mug down on the coffee table. “Tastes like a backyard barbeque. You like this stuff?”

Steve deflates, but he won’t be entirely deterred just yet. He has another trick up his sleeve. He sets his own mug down and leans across the couch to Bucky. The light in the room is low, the dark outside the window solid enough to punch a hole through. He inches closer to him till he’s flush by Bucky’s side and lays a hand on his knee.

“I do,” Steve murmurs, licking his lips deliberately slowly. “You sure you don’t?”

He doesn’t give Bucky a moment to answer, closing the distance and kissing him with an open mouth. Bucky responds to him quickly, his tongue sliding slick against Steve’s, tasting the rich darkness of the tea as he clutches at Steve’s waist. After long minutes, long enough for the flavor to dissipate in Steve’s mouth, he pulls away with a wet smack. He leans back far enough to catch a glimpse of Bucky’s eyes, the pupils blown wide.

“Huh,” Bucky murmurs. He glances sideways at his mug, then lets go of Steve to grab it for another sip. He smacks his lips contemplatively, frowning down into the brown liquid. “Have I had this before?”

Steve’s heart hammers. “Does it taste familiar?” 

“It—yeah. But I … When—I don’t remember ever drinking …” Bucky takes another sip and scowls, cogs of his brain whirring so obviously hard.  “I’ve had this before,” he affirms.

“You have.”

“Where? When?”

Steve takes a slow breath. “In England. 1944.”

Bucky turns his glower sharply toward Steve, his eyes widening. But then he takes another sip and closes his eyes. He sits incredibly still for a long time, fingers flexing around the mug, the lines of his face alternately tightening and relaxing. Steve holds his breath and waits, silent as the street outside for fear of disturbing whatever’s going on inside Bucky’s head right now. He would give anything to see it, to watch the memories blooming in his mind’s eye.

Jerking to life, Bucky’s eyes snapping open, a wild inhale tearing through him. Steve startles so hard his tea splashes hotly into his lap. Wordlessly, Bucky presses a shaking hand against his temple like he’s trying to hold something at bay. 

Steve sets his mug to the side and lays a hand on his shoulder, whispering, “Don’t fight it. It’s real, let it in. I promise you it’s real.”

Bucky whips his head around to look at Steve, his face contorted with confusion and fear. “Why do I—I don’t understand.”

“It’s real, Bucky. Whatever you’re remembering, it happened.”

“It can’t be,” Bucky breathes, shaking his head. “It can’t be real.”

“Why not?” Steve asks softly.

“I’ve never been to London.”

“You have,” Steve insists. “I have too. We were there together.”

Bucky’s voice drops low and harsh, and he scowls again. “I’ve never been to London,” he repeats with more conviction.

“You—” Steve starts, but Bucky pushes away from him and stands. He sets his mug down on the table hard enough that it sloshes.

“I don’t want to talk about this,” Bucky says. “I’m going to bed.”

With that, Bucky whisks away into the bedroom, slamming the door behind him.

Steve slumps down onto the couch cushions and breathes deeply. It was bound to fail the first time. He would never have been so lucky as to get it right immediately. Bringing Bucky back to himself will take effort, more than just jogging one trivial memory. He will need to chip away, one here, one there, till the block gives way and they flow freely, a dam breaking.

He finds his mug again and takes a long pull. The tea has gone lukewarm by now, but he drinks it down anyway till all that’s left is the leafy sediment. As he stares into the bottom of the cup, the sound of the bedroom door creaking open grabs his attention. He glances up to see that Bucky pushed it ajar again, a silent invitation to come to bed. An indication that he’s not irredeemably mad at Steve for acting so consistently, bafflingly bizarre.

He will try again tomorrow. For now, he goes to bed.

 

Steve wakes up groggily, alone in his twin bed with the blankets ensnared around him like he’d tossed and turned. He shoves them off, too hot, and it takes him a halting moment to place what feels off about the morning. There’s the chain pattern of the quilt beneath his hands, a few threads pulling loose from the old stitches. The room smells the way it should, shoe polish and last night’s soup, the faintest whiff from Bucky’s cologne where it sits on top of the dresser. The light slants in sideways through the single window on the opposite wall, the soft glow of early morning. Bucky, breathing solidly in his own bed a few feet away. 

The familiarity of it aches, pulling at him like the tide going out, dragging him to sea. It’s the aching that gives him pause. Why should it hurt to wake up at home, warm and safe in his own bed?

Bucky sniffles in his sleep, the bed springs sighing as he rolls over.

It hits Steve, a quick one-two punch to the gut. He breathes through the remembering again, and the suffocating feeling passes.

This place keeps towing him out to open water like a riptide. If he isn’t careful, if he doesn’t keep meticulous watch over himself and his own head, it might drag him so far out he can’t get his bearings enough to haul himself back to shore. Slipping under the current would be all too easy, but that’s not what he wants. 

He lies there as the room slowly lightens, grounding himself in thoughts that concretely remind him that this is not reality. Or—it is, it is his reality right now, but there are things that exist beyond it, before and after it. Sam and Natasha, the Avengers and Tony, Clint and Bruce and Thor. People solidify it the most—Steve knows he’s not nearly creative enough to come up with the kind of antics Tony pulls, the way Nat sees straight through him, Sam’s thoughtfulness and charm. They’re real. He couldn’t have made them up.

Suddenly he feels a bone deep empathy for Peggy, his darling girl, who forgets where she is, what year she’s in, but always knows him despite it. He knows what that feels like, waking up in a different time than the one you were expecting. He’ll bring her something sweet next time he sees her, sneak it past the nurses. If he sees her again. No. When.

It’s almost like dreaming, thinking of the life he’d been leading not two days ago. It doesn’t feel real. He knows that it—it  _ is _ , it’s real—but there’s a tenuous, watery quality to the memories, like they might slip between his cupped hands trying to hold them. Keeping his fingers pressed so tightly together takes great effort. As he strains, the bright light turns the inside of his eyelids red.

“Steve?” Bucky calls out tentatively, voice raspy.

Steve jolts awake again, sitting up so quickly his head spins. Bucky is still lying in his bed, tucked in straight and unmoving, staring at the ceiling. The tension in his body tells Steve that he may have woken up just as disoriented. He can’t decide if that means he’s gaining ground or not.

“Steve,” Bucky repeats when Steve doesn’t answer. He turns his head to check that Steve is still there. His eyes are tired, shadows cut underneath them like he barely slept at all.

“Morning, Bucky,” Steve says quietly. Bucky looks back up the ceiling, and his left hand clenches and unclenches in the quilt. Steve wants to grab it and hold on to stop him, press it to his cheek so he can feel Bucky’s skin. Instead, he asks, “Do you want breakfast?”

“Yes,” Bucky says, and Steve waits till he continues, “eggs and bacon, if we’ve got it.”

“We should,” Steve says, slipping out of bed. He tries to right the blankets, but they’re so twisted up he’ll need to strip the bed before he can fix them. He gives up and heads toward the kitchen to get breakfast going.

“Steve?” Bucky calls out again. Steve pauses in the doorway, glancing over his shoulder to see Bucky propped up on his elbows.

“Yeah?”

“Can you—” Bucky starts, and then drops his gaze to his lap, mouth twisting. “Will you make that tea again too?”

Steve raises his eyebrows and inhales sharply, but he recovers quickly. He nods. “Yeah, I can. I’ll have it ready in ten minutes. You want me to bring it to you in here?”

Bucky huffs and flops back down against the mattress. “Christ, Steve, I’m not an invalid. I’ll come out to the table.”

Steve chuckles as he turns away again, tucking the hope away for now. He’ll focus on breakfast and see what comes from that, then go from there, one step at a time.

“And you better not burn the bacon!” Bucky shouts. Steve’s still laughing as he lights the stove.

They eat quietly, sunny side up eggs and crispy bacon. Bucky focuses on his food, drinking his tea almost offhandedly between forkfuls. Steve watches him as he clears his own plate, like Bucky’s trying to sneak up on himself with the taste. He doesn’t press him about it though, has decided that it’s too early in the day to be so pushy. An unconventional tactic for him, maybe, but he’s realized that while he may be encouraging Bucky to remember, there’s no way to force him into it. Being so insistent about it might just break Bucky’s trust in him, and then where would they be? Stuck here forever probably.

He pops the last bit of bacon into his mouth, wiping the grease from his lips with a thumb. Meeting Bucky’s eye across the table, he asks, “What do you want to do today?”

Bucky raises his eyebrows, thinking while he chews. He swallows, and a slow smile spreads across his face. “Nothing?”

Steve huffs a laugh, grinning back. “Sounds perfect to me.”

Another rarity for them: days when neither of them had work or any other obligations or plans. It wasn’t often that they got to just stay in, stay in their pajamas, and do nothing of consequence all day. Usually it’d be a Sunday, skiving off church to sleep in and eat too much breakfast, leave the radio on all day and stay in bed half the daylight hours. There weren’t a lot of breaks to catch, so when they grabbed hold of one, they tucked it under arm and ran away with it.

This place is starting to seem like a veritable treasure trove of all the tiniest details Steve misses about their life together here.

He ducks into their room to pull a sweater on over his undershirt and grab his sketchbook from the drawer in the nightstand. He checks that the key is still where he hid it last night, in a paper box of old crayons he hasn’t used since Bucky’s ma got him the nice set of colored pencils for Christmas. There it is, wrought darkness tucked between gold ochre and celestial blue. Though the burn mark has mysteriously faded now, Steve can still feel the tingle of it on his palm, how it felt so inexplicably heavy in his hand but like nothing at all in his pocket. He grabs Bucky’s book off the nightstand and hurries back out to the living room.

Bucky has the radio going already, and it plays something slow and sweet. The window is open, Bucky leaning an elbow on the sill with his torso halfway outside. As Steve settles onto the couch, cracking open the sketchbook in his lap, Bucky blows out a wispy puff of smoke. He’s always careful to keep the smoke and the smell outside as much as can, lest he set Steve to wheezing. Stubbing out the cigarette on the building’s brick, he drops the butt to the street below and slides back through the window.

“You can leave that open,” Steve says, staring down at the blank page and sharpening his pencil.

“Okay,” Bucky answers, padding across the room. His footsteps stop just behind Steve, who cranes his neck around and then up when he realizes Bucky’s leaning over the back of the couch. Bucky peers down at him, hands planted above Steve’s shoulders on either side.

“That my sweater?”

Steve smiles sheepishly, fingers pulling at the hem of the green fabric. It’s too big on Steve, but it’s well-worn and comfortable. Best of all, it smells like Bucky.

“It’s softer than any of mine.” Steve shrugs, leaning forward to set the sharpener on the coffee table.

“And what if I wanted to wear it?” Bucky asks.

“Then I’d say here.” Steve grabs the hem and starts to yank it off.

Laughing, Bucky says, “Steve, I’m kidding. Keep it on, you look swell.” He musses Steve’s hair like he’s some little kid. Steve huffs and hurriedly fixes it as Bucky vaults over the couch back to land in a heap on the cushions, bare legs halfway in Steve’s lap.

“Bucky!” Steve shouts, smacking his knee. He pries his sketchbook from under Bucky’s calves as Bucky shifts and sighs, head pillowed on the armrest.

“You really minded, you could push me off,” Bucky says. Steve rolls his eyes and grumbles about it, but it’s good natured. Bucky picks up his book, Steve puts pencil to paper, and they settle in for the morning.

He doesn’t set out to do it. Steve sketches him reflexively—the wide slope of his nose, the tilt of his smile, his bright eyes. The details are easy, burned into his brain from a lifetime of this. He doesn’t have to look to get him right, but he does anyway. Bucky notices him stealing glances, and that sweet smile appears over the top of his book. Steve’s hand flies across the page to capture it in real time. 

Once he has the essence of him down, Steve gets an idea. He fills out the rest of the image. He draws him standing straight and strong, wide shoulders under the pressed jacket. He sets the hat at a playful angle and knots his tie up tight. Beneath his hand, a sergeant comes to life.

It takes a long time, becoming less of a sketch and more of a bona fide portrait as the hours pass. Bucky falls asleep with his book resting on his chest, napping quietly with his legs still strewn across Steve’s lap. His calves aren’t the best desk in the world, but they do nicely. Eventually though, Steve finishes up the last of the shading, and it’s nearing lunch time. 

He sets his sketchbook to the side and gently lifts Bucky’s legs to slide out from under them. He manages to escape without waking him up and tiptoes into the kitchen to scrounge up some sandwiches. There’s leftover bread from dinner and sliced turkey in the icebox, a few fresh tomatoes sitting conspicuously on the counter. He assembles lunch and brings it back to the living room, where Bucky is just returning to the waking world.

“Up and at ‘em,” Steve says as he sets a plate on Bucky’s stomach. “Lunch bell’s ringing.”

“Thanks,” Bucky says groggily, easing up into a position more conducive to eating. 

When they’re done, Bucky clears away the plates. Steve opens the sketchbook in his lap again, staring down at his work. It’s been such a long time since he properly drew him.

“What’s that?” Bucky asks, flopping back down onto the couch. He leans in toward Steve, looping an arm over his shoulder. “Can I see?”

“If you want,” Steve says. As he slides the book from his lap to Bucky’s, he hears a soft intake of breath. It’s not quite a gasp, but it is something. He looks sideways at Bucky, who stares down at the page with wide eyes, hand at his mouth. There’s the tiniest pinch in his forehead, and Steve can practically see the gears turning in his head. Are they the right gears though? Did he flip the right switches inside of him this time?

“I look sharp,” Bucky says softly. His index finger traces the lines of the dress uniform, careful not to smudge the graphite.

“You always look sharp,” Steve says. Bucky makes even his boxers and undershirt look like he put in effort.

He squeezes Steve’s shoulder, drawing him in closer against his side as he continues looking, riveted. “No, I mean—you made me look like I got something to be proud of.”

“You do,” Steve answers.

Bucky laughs, but it’s not sharp or bitter. With one last lingering look, he closes the sketchbook and sets it on the coffee table. He turns to Steve with a fond smile. “Yeah, guess I do have a few things.”

He hauls Steve down sideways with him till they’re laying on the couch, Bucky on his back with Steve halfway on top of him, wedged between the couch cushions and Bucky’s body. The radio croons out an unfamiliar ballad. Steve lays his head over Bucky’s chest, and he listens to the thrum of his heart, a song he’ll always recognize.

“Would you enlist? If we got into the war?” 

Steve knows the answer to his question, knows what happens like an oracle. He doesn’t remember if they ever talked about this—if he ever asked Bucky that. He’d had such a chip on his shoulder, had been so hellbent on enlisting himself he hadn’t stopped to wonder whether Bucky wanted to too. He had assumed that he did, and he’d been right. What he hadn’t expected was the way it rankled him when the army took Bucky so immediately, and then the wash of guilt at his ridiculous envy. It had seemed so big back then, like everything hinged on it. Everything had in a way, but in the face of all that came after, it seems so unimportant now.

Bucky says, very quietly, “I don’t know. I don’t think so. Is that bad?”

Steve lifts his head, startled. Bucky meets his eye, and he looks worried, his mouth pressed into a hard line. Steve recovers and shakes his head. “No, no. There’s a lot of reasons not to.”

“Yeah,” Bucky sighs. “It’s just—ma, the girls, and… I know they’d be fine without me, but I don’t want them to have to figure out how to be, y’know?”

“I know.” Steve settles back against Bucky’s chest, holding him tightly. Bucky’s father was good for getting the bills paid, but that was about it. Bucky was more of a dad to his three baby sisters than he ought to have had to be at such a young age, but it never seemed to bother him. He’d dropped out of high school to help raise them and had only moved out because his ma had as good as chased him away with her broom, telling him he needed to start living his life for himself. Despite her efforts, he never got much of a chance to do that. Still hasn’t.

It sits oddly in Steve’s chest, these puzzle pieces clicking into place. If this is what he thought, what changed his mind? A lot of men got swept up in the fervor of patriotism after Pearl Harbor. Maybe it’d been that, or maybe his ma’s words had finally sunk in and he’d made a decision for himself. That or he’d decided to protect the whole country instead of just his sisters and Steve. 

“Would you?” Bucky asks, dragging Steve out of his memories.

“Yes,” he answers immediately, that old righteous anger making him go stiff in Bucky’s arms.

Bucky sighs and strokes at his back. “I guess I knew that already.”

Steve relaxes under his hand, but he wonders if Bucky means that he _knew_ _that_ , or just that Steve is predictably self-sacrificing.

“Now I’m in a vulnerable position, Steve, so don’t hit me because I don’t mean any ill by it,” Bucky starts warningly. Steve huffs and pinches his side. “But do you really—do you think they’d take you?”

Steve feels himself prickle, but then he remembers—it’s not important anymore. He knows all the answers. He sighs into Bucky’s skin, then lifts up on one elbow to look him in the eye.

“They’ll take me,” he says. “The army won’t want me, but they’ll take me anyway. Then I’ll fight goddamn hard for this country and prove them wrong. We’ll win, and I’ll help us do it.”

Bucky stares up at him, either cowed by or in awe of his conviction—maybe both. He smiles though. “Sounds about right. I’d expect nothing less from you, Captain,” Buck says with a little salute.

Steve’s breath catches. “Captain?”

“Yeah,” Bucky shrugs, pointing to the sketchbook. “Figure if I’m a sergeant, you’re my CO, right? You’d earn that title by sheer force of will. Or maybe reckless stupidity that works out for you somehow, either way.”

Steve grins, because it’s so close to the truth. He’s almost got it right, like a mirror covered in dust, if he could just wipe away the grime. He wants to take Bucky by the shoulders and shake him till the memories come out clean.

He doesn’t though. Instead, he says, “Sounds about right.” 

He smacks a kiss against Bucky’s cheek and nestles back down into the couch. They’re both quiet for a long time, Bucky’s hand ducking under Steve’s sweater to stroke at his spine in the spot that used to ache. Steve rubs slow circles into his side, breathing against his neck. He’s on the edge of a nap when Bucky’s voice brings him back.

“It’s just so scary to think about,” he whispers.

“What is?” Steve prompts.

“Going to war. You and me, if we go to war—I’m so scared of what happens to us.” The tense makes Steve’s heart quicken, or maybe it’s speeding to match Bucky’s, thundering beneath him. “The papers say it’s brutal over there. So many men have died already.”

Steve pauses, then murmurs, “There are fates worse than death.”

“I know.” Bucky laughs wryly, but it twists in his throat and turns into a shaky sob. “God, I  _ know _ . Does it make me a coward if I don’t wanna face any of them? I don’t know how I know, Steve, but I know that if we go to war—you and me, we don’t come back. We don’t make it back here.”

He feels the tears run off Bucky’s chin and into his hair. He lifts up again, reaching for Bucky’s face to wipe away the wetness from his cheeks. Bucky raises a hand to catch Steve’s own tears before they get a chance to fall.

“Whatever happens,” Steve says. “Whatever happens, we will survive. Okay? We’re going to live. We’ll make it out. I promise.”

Steve isn’t sure which era of their lives he’s talking about anymore—maybe all of them. That’s their tune after all, surviving when all the odds say that they shouldn’t. Even when the odds say that they didn’t.

Bucky nods tentatively at first, then with more conviction. He hauls Steve back in against his chest and says, “I believe you.”

 

Steve falls asleep after a while, the steady rhythm of Bucky’s breathing as good as any lullaby. He’s not sure how long he’s out, but he wakes up to Bucky scratching his back and murmuring his name.

“Hey, honey. Sorry to wake you, but I gotta get up for a minute. Can you scooch?” 

Bucky could have dumped Steve off him easily. Steve’s happy that he didn’t. He shuffles back against the couch cushions until Bucky can slip out from underneath him. Steve rolls onto his back as Bucky goes to the bedroom. He comes back out a minute later, a ratty old button-down open over his undershirt, and heads to the kitchen. Steve sits up to look at him as he pours a glass of water. Bucky drinks, and there’s a heavy set to his brow, his eyes pinched like he’s in pain.

“You alright, Buck?” Steve asks, standing up to go to him.

Bucky sets the glass down and wipes his mouth with the back of a hand, waving Steve off with the other. “‘M’fine, just got a headache.”

“Your head hurts?” Steve moves in for a closer look, peering into Bucky’s blurry eyes like he might be able to see the source of the problem in them. He just looks hazy, out of focus.

“I just said, didn’t I?” Bucky huffs. He swats Steve’s hand away when he reaches to feel Bucky’s forehead.

“Will you—you dope, let me help you.” Steve grabs both of Bucky’s hands and holds them down, looking sternly into Bucky’s face. Bucky looks like he might pull free, but Steve says, “I let you help me. Don’t start any of this double standard bullshit again.”

Bucky sighs loudly, but he relents and relaxes under Steve’s hands. Steve lets him go to get a hand towel to wrap some ice from the icebox. He sits Bucky down in a dining chair and climbs onto the table for a better angle. With his bare feet in Bucky’s lap, he holds the compress to his forehead and lays his free arm over Bucky’s shoulders, kneading tension out of the base of his neck.

Bucky slumps sideways till his head rests on Steve’s chest, the left side where he can hear his heartbeat. He sighs again, but this time it sounds like he’s relieved. Steve kisses the top of his head.

“Better?” he asks.

“It’s helping,” Bucky breathes. “Thanks for being such a stubborn asshole.”

“That’s my name,” Steve says. “Did you wake up hurting?”

“No, I—I never fell asleep. My head started hurting while we were talking. Feels like something’s trying to punch it’s way outta there.”

Steve holds his breath. He knows what he wants to say— _ maybe you should let it _ . That wouldn’t come across well though, would probably set Bucky on edge with him again. They’ve been doing so well today. As much as Steve hates that he’s hurting, he can’t help but think that it might be a good sign. Whatever’s blocking Bucky’s memories is having a hell of time keeping them locked up in that box in his head.

“It’ll pass,” he says, carding his fingers through Bucky’s hair and shifting the compress to his temple. “Just breathe and try not to focus on it.”

Bucky whimpers softly, but otherwise stays quiet. He pants hot, ragged breaths against Steve’s chest. He clutches at Steve’s legs in his lap, his grip spasming every once in awhile as another wave of pain hits him. The ice starts to melt, dripping cold droplets of water onto Steve’s hand and down Bucky’s face, already wet with sweat.  It takes a long time for his breathing to even out. As it does, Steve feels his heart rate slow back to a normal rhythm. He finds Bucky’s pulse point on his neck; under his fingers, Bucky’s heart slows too.

Bucky’s eyelids flutter open, and Steve uses the towel to wipe the sweat away from his hairline and face before setting it aside. He brings both hands up to cup Bucky’s face, his thumbs stroking over his temples. Bucky lifts his eyes to look at Steve’s face. He frowns, just the slightest bit.

“You’re tall,” he croaks.

“I’m just on the table, silly,” Steve says.

“No, I remember,” Bucky insists. He winces, eyes snapping closed again, but he nods. “You were tall. You were taller than me. It scared me at first, I didn’t understand, but then you—then I …” His voice trails off like he lost the path he was on, and he frowns deeper.

“Bucky?” Steve prompts. He’s so close, right on the edge. A bridge between this side and the other unfurls itself over the dark chasm in Steve’s mind’s eye, they’re so  _ close _ —if Bucky could take just one more step, they could cross, make it to the other side. 

“You were tall,” Bucky repeats like he’s trying to convince himself.

“I was,” Steve assures him, a frantic edge to his voice. “You’re right. That’s right.”

Bucky exhales shakily, his hands flexing and clawing at Steve’s kneecaps, nails digging in so hard he might break the skin. Steve paws at his face like he might be able to pull it out of him, keep it there at the forefront, sheer force of will. Bucky opens his eyes to look at him, red-rimmed and burning.

He blinks, and his expression smooths over. He collapses forward against Steve’s chest, forehead thumping against sternum. 

“Bucky, hey. Buck, look at me,” Steve stammers, and his hands are frenzied over Bucky’s face now. “Hey, sugar, come on. Look at me. What were you thinking, Bucky? Come on, I was tall, what else? What else do you remember?”

“Steve,” Bucky groans into his sweater. “I’m real tired. Can’t I just go to bed?”

The breath punches out of him before he can hold it in, and without Bucky to catch them before they fall, silent tears spill over in earnest now.

“Don’t you—do you want some dinner first?” Steve asks. “I could—we’ve got the soup. I can heat it up on the stove. You should eat some soup.”

“Maybe later,” Bucky says. “I wanna lie down awhile.”

“Okay.” Steve feels utterly defeated like he hasn’t in a long time, pummeled and bruised till he doesn’t have any fight left. Another rarity. “Okay, come on. Let’s get you to bed. We’ll try again tomorrow.” 

He slides off the table first, hauling Bucky up as best he can in this small body. He pulls Bucky’s arm around his shoulder and drags him toward the bedroom. He can feel it inside him each time his heart beats, like a kick to the chest.

He lies with with him for hours, Bucky’s face pressed into his chest, hands curling in Steve’s sweater even while he sleeps. He wakes him up and makes him eat after it gets dark, a few spoonfuls of soup till Bucky turns ashen and pushes the bowl away. Steve cleans up and shuts the radio off. 

He considers sleeping in his own bed, but Bucky holds out a hand for him and—they’re close, aren’t they? What comes next? Through the door, back into the world, and then … what? Where do they go from there?

Steve doesn’t know the answer to that question. There’s no way to figure it out right now, so he goes to Bucky and lets that be enough for the night.


	5. Chapter 5

In the morning Bucky’s feeling better, the color returned to his cheeks as he whips them up the biggest breakfast this apartment’s ever seen. He makes pancakes, but they’re not like any pancakes Steve’s ever had. They’re crispy and sweet, made with cottage cheese and raisins. Bucky serves them with sour cream and raspberries on the side. Delicious, but—

“Bucky?”

“Yeah?” There’s a fleck of sour cream on his chin. Steve reaches across the table to wipe it away and licks it from his thumb. Bucky bites back a smile.

“What kinda pancakes are these? They’re real good,” Steve says. He takes another bite to make his point.

Bucky pops a raspberry in his mouth. “ _Syrniki_.”

Steve raises an eyebrow and glances down at his plate. He only has a bit of the language, but he’d recognize the guttural sound of Russian anywhere. “Where’d you learn to make ‘em?”

Bucky meets his eye and blanches. He stutters out a cough. “I don’t kn—I don’t remember.”

Steve watches him carefully for a wince or twitch of the brow. His cheek muscle jumps, and that’s enough for Steve for now. He shrugs and says around another mouthful, “Like I said, they’re good.”

“It’s rude to talk with your mouth full.” Bucky wags his fork at Steve threateningly, but he laughs too. “I’m glad you like them.”

“I thought we could do something fun today,” Steve says. They haven’t left the apartment in two days. Getting out could be good for them, for Bucky—that, and he’s vaguely worried the door might seal shut and trap them.

“Like what?”

“When’s the last time we made it down to Coney Island?” Steve tilts his head, trying doggedly to actually remember. It’d have to have been ‘41, he supposes, or maybe ‘40. Most of that time blurs together—he hadn’t been much for fun in those years, and Bucky had been gone for a lot of it.

“D’y’know, I can’t remember,” Bucky says.

Steve thinks, _Gee, really?_ But he just raises an eyebrow and grins. “How ‘bout it then?”

“Better bring a hat, you ghost.”

 

Bucky leads the way to the Court Street station, bouncing on his toes like a kid. Steve follows him, for once unbothered by the emptiness of the city. The sky is crystalline blue overhead. Bucky tugs him down the street, laughing as they go. The sound of their voices echoes faintly down the deserted block.

Steve hesitates briefly at the top of the steps. It’s utterly dark down below, not the dark of an unlit room—deeper somehow, like total blindness.

Bucky doesn’t balk at all. He says, “Come on, Steve, we’ll miss the train,” and plunges down the stairs. Steve grasps his hand and holds him back, but when Bucky glances up at him with a concerned smile, there’s no choice but to follow down after him.

As they descend the stairs, lights manifest in the station, blinking to life and flooding the platform in a soft glow. Bucky parks them at the platform’s edge. Without the preamble of rattling wheels or even a gust of wind, a steel train rolls into the station and shudders to a stop. The double doors ease open directly in front of them, and they board the empty car.

They ride south and keep going without a transfer. There should have been two, at Fulton and 59th, before they even made it onto the Sea Beach Line. It should have taken them forty minutes to get there. Steve is learning that shoulds don’t matter so much anymore, as the train enters the Stillwell station and grinds to a halt.

Bucky barrels halfway out the doors before they’re properly opened, leaving Steve to chase after him.

“Okay, we need a plan,” Bucky prattles as they tumble up the steps toward daylight. “I’m thinking we hit the beach, then once you’re good and sunburned, we can get lunch at Feltman’s. Or should we get hotdogs and cruise the boardwalk? Then I wanna go to Steeplechase Park, or maybe Luna, or both. Steve? What do you think?”

He stops on the sidewalk to turn to Steve, who just shakes his head fondly. Bucky’s wired up like a kid on cotton candy, excitement pouring off him in waves. Steve can’t help but to grin at him.

“We can do whatever you want, Buck. I’m just along for the ride,” he says. “Though we might wanna skip lunch till after the rides.”

“Yeah, okay,” Bucky laughs. He slings an arm around Steve’s shoulders and guides him toward the beach. “I’ll accommodate your weak stomach if I really gotta.”

It’s strange to see this place so empty. Not that it wasn’t to see their own neighborhood the same way, but Brooklyn Heights was usually quiet anyway. Coney Island though—Steve’s never seen a place as packed as Coney gets on a summer Sunday. Half the city poured out of their homes to come down here on weekends. It was almost stiflingly crowded, the kind of crowds where you hold onto the back of your friend’s shirt to keep together as you navigate them. The el rattling over Ocean Parkway, the chatter of children on the boardwalk, people shrieking as amusement rides whipped them around—the noise pressed in on you as much as the people did.

Now though, as Stillwell Avenue transitions into sand beneath their shoes, all is quiet. There’s not a single soul to push past, no food smells or even a breeze to ruffle their hair. The air is neither hot nor cold, a perfectly comfortable medium.

It should be pleasant. Steve should be excited to have the beach all to themselves. When will he ever get another chance like this?

He glances at Bucky to gauge his reaction. As Bucky surveys the empty expanse of sand, a slight frown pinches his face. He looks to Steve.

“Guess we have the place all to ourselves today, huh?” Bucky hesitates, but he does smile.

“Don’t you think that’s weird?”

Bucky squints hard at the unmanned lifeguard stand, tilting his head sideways like he’s just got the angle wrong. Then he blinks and shrugs. “I suppose we’ll just have to be careful.”

He drags Steve forward a few more feet and then collapses bodily into the sand, starfishing out like he might make a snow angel. He doesn’t, but he does wriggle around, settling himself into a hollow. It’s ridiculous, him flopping like a beached whale—but oddly endearing too.

Steve doesn’t think about it. He sees him, and his body reacts, because that’s the way it goes with them most of the time. One second he’s watching, and the next he’s on top of him.

Bucky grunts with the impact, but then he’s laughing, whole body shaking as he scoops Steve up in his arms. Steve laughs too as Bucky rolls them over, pinning Steve in the sand.

“You trying to get the drop on me?” Bucky asks, leaning into him. Steve can feel the sand getting in his hair, working its way into his shirt collar, but he doesn’t mind so much with Bucky grinning at him like that. There’s not a whole lot he would mind, like this.

“Nah, you’re the sneaky one, not me,” Steve says.

“That’s right,” Bucky says. He slides an arm free to prop himself up, lifting some of his weight off Steve. His face grows serious. “That’s right. You come out guns blazing or not at all. I’ll be the quiet one, making sure you don’t get shot when you forget to check your six. That stupid dinner plate ain’t half as reliable as me.”

Steve sobers, breath lodging in his chest. His heart stutters, then starts to hammer, pounding away at his sternum like it’s trying to break it.

“That’s right,” he murmurs.

“Gotta protect my CO,” Bucky says. He smiles again, and it’s pained, his brow drawn in—but he hides it well, ducking down to kiss Steve’s forehead before rolling off him.

Steve rolls with him, on his side with one elbow propping him up. “Bucky,” he says slowly.

“Yeah?” Bucky asks. He holds up both hands in front of face, turning them over and back again to look. He drops his right, and stares hard at his left.

“Bucky,” Steve repeats. “Dinner plate?”

“Your shield,” Bucky says without looking at him.

Steve leans over him, vaulting till he straddles his waist. He grabs Bucky’s face between both of his hands, and he can feel his own heartbeat where his palms grip Bucky’s cheeks—or maybe it’s Bucky’s heartbeat, quick and loud beneath his skin.

“You were with the 107th,” Steve fires at him. “You were a sergeant. I did something stupid and made it into the army after all. I ended up your CO—you did have my back. Jesus, the number of times you saved my ass, I can’t even count. You saved me. You did, remember?”

“Steve,” Bucky mutters. His eyelids flutter shut, and he cringes away from Steve’s grip, head digging into the sand. “Don’t.”

“You saved me!” Steve shouts. “Let me save you, Buck—dammit, look at me! Let me save you!”

Desperation flares flame-hot inside him as he paws at Bucky’s face, claws at his scalp like he can drag the memories out of him, _make_ him remember if he only wills it hard enough. Bucky shrinks beneath him, writhing properly and trying to get away from Steve’s nails rasping over his skin, trying to find purchase in his mind.

“Get off me,” he grunts. Steve only plants himself more firmly over him, knees tight around his hips. “Get off!”

This time Bucky shoves him, both hands square into Steve’s chest. Steve topples backward and lands heavily in the sand, limbs sprawling as Bucky scrambles out from underneath him. Both of them stand rapidly, Steve’s head swimming with the drop in blood pressure or something else he can’t name. Bucky spins on his heel and walks away from him.

“Bucky!” Steve calls, hurrying after him, tripping over the uneven sand as it shifts under his feet. “Bucky, stop!”

“What?” Bucky growls, turning to face him. “What do you want? What do you want from me?”

Steve stutters to a stop, reaching out for him. Bucky shies away from his grip, but Steve lays hands on him anyway. “You said—you said it! You remembered my shield—what else? Tell me what else you remember.”

Bucky shudders in his grasp, head tipping forward chin to chest. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Bucky, no—you do, you remember, you just _said_ —”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Steve!”

“Fine,” Steve spits, and he knows that the fear is making him hostile. He can feel it, but he can’t stop it, an animal in a cage trying to find a way out, biting the hand that could open the door for him. “Fine! You don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“I don’t,” Bucky repeats. His head still hangs, so Steve gets a hand under his chin and tilts it up just enough so he can see his eyes.

“You remember me like this?” Steve says, dropping his other hand from Bucky’s arm to gesture at himself.

“Yes,” Bucky answers.

“You remember me any other way?”

“What does that mean?”

“It means—” Steve sighs raggedly, casting his eyes about for an answer. He finds it in the empty beach, sand sparkling under the light of day. “Look around, Buck. Look properly. You remember Coney Island.”

“Of course I remember Coney, Steve. Why wouldn’t I?”

“Do you remember it like _this_?” He drops both hands from Bucky to spread them out wide, indicating the whole deserted beach, the barren boardwalk, the ocean that’s so still—he hadn’t even noticed himself, but the milky water doesn’t churn. It’s still as glass, fading out into smooth whiteness at the horizon.

“I—” Bucky starts. The defiance drains out of him as he looks, seeming to absorb it fully for the first time. His eyes widen, raw with sudden fear.

“It’s quiet,” Steve says. “Silent and empty. That’s not right, is it?”

“No,” Bucky whispers. His hand darts out to grab Steve’s, and Steve lets him, wrapping his fingers up tight between both palms.

“Why isn’t it right, Bucky?” he prompts gently.

“It’s—I … I don’t know, I don’t know, Steve. I want to go home,” Bucky says, turning his frightened eyes on Steve.

Steve takes a slow breath, teetering on the edge of a precipice. He says, “It’s not right because it’s not real, Buck. It’s not real.”

“What?” Bucky gasps. “I don’t understand. I want to go _home_.”

“We can’t, sugar, we can’t,” Steve says. He steps closer to him, one hand gripping Bucky’s tight as he lays the other over his chest. “We can’t go home until you remember. You have to remember, Bucky. I’m so sorry. You have to, or we’ll never get out of this place.”

“No, no— _no_!” Bucky thunders, ripping away from Steve’s grip and stumbling backward. “I don’t—stop it! We’re going home!”

“That’s what I’m trying to—” Steve cuts off as a crack of thunder peals through the air, so loud he can feel it rattling his eardrums. He glances at the sky, but there are no clouds. He looks back to Bucky, who stares him down, hotly angry and wild with confusion.

“I want to go home.”

Another deep rumble emits from nowhere at all. Steve lunges for Bucky, that same feeling—that abject _terror_ that if he doesn’t hold onto him, he’ll lose him, he’ll be gone. He snags him by the wrist. Bucky tries to shake him loose, protesting wordlessly, but Steve gets his arms around his middle and holds him like his life depends on it. It very well may.

The sky splits open above them, not with rain but with grey, the color draining out like blood draining from a body. The beach shakes and distorts, blurring into indistinct lines and shapes. He sees something, out of the corner of his eye, something dark as tar and just as miry.

He presses his face to Bucky’s chest to hide from it and inhales the smell of him, the sharp scent of cologne and tobacco and soap. He holds him and doesn’t let go even as Bucky shouts at him.

“Bucky,” he breathes. He clutches him close like a treasure, invaluable. The sky howls again, bloodcurdling and loud. If this is it—if the world shatters around them now—he’ll go out with his most prized belonging in his hands this time. He won’t let that be taken from him again. They go out together, this time.

“Steve,” Bucky sobs, and his arms finally circle Steve’s shoulders too. He pulls him in snug and buries his face in Steve’s hair. “Can we go home? I want to go home.”

Tired of fighting it, ready to give in, Steve murmurs, “Whatever you want, Buck.”

It’s not a crack so much as a pop this time—a bubble bursting.

Steve pulls back just a fraction, enough to check if there’s any source to the sound. He glances left, and he sees the couch. To his right, the kitchen and door. Behind him, the bedroom. They’re standing in the middle of their own living room, on top of the coffee table.

“Steve?”

Steve jerks up to look at Bucky. He’s whipping his head around, blinking and frenetic—trying to take it in, to understand.

“Bucky?”

“Steve?” Bucky repeats, and finally his eyes land on Steve. His grip around Steve’s shoulders tightens. “What just happened?”

“You …” Steve starts. “You noticed that?”

Bucky’s panting raggedly now, working himself into disoriented panic. “Steve, what the hell is happening?”

“Tell me,” Steve says. He tries to disengage from Bucky’s embrace, but now it’s him who won’t let Steve go. Steve maneuvers them awkwardly off the coffee table and onto the couch. Bucky still clings to him like a life preserver, like Steve’s the only thing keeping him afloat right now. He presses himself snug against Bucky, breathing evenly, pacing himself till Bucky’s breaths slow too.

“Tell me,” Steve says again. He lays a hand over Bucky’s cheek. “Tell me what you think just happened.”

“We were at Coney,” Bucky says, “and now we’re … not.”

Steve nods, his thumb stroking over Bucky’s cheekbone. “Where are we?”

Bucky watches his face, like he’s waiting for Steve to give him the answer. After long seconds, he says, “Home.”

“Do you really believe that?” Steve murmurs.

“I—” Bucky begins, cutting off like someone ripped the words out of his throat before they made it to his mouth. He scans the room furtively. “It looks like home.”

“It does,” Steve confirms, dropping his hand to Bucky’s leg. Bucky meets his eye again, brow steepled. “It looks the way it should. You’re right about that.”

“Where are we?” Bucky asks, his voice rough with confusion.

“How did you get here, Bucky?”

Bucky blinks at him. “We took the trolley.”

“No, I—” Steve takes a sharp breath, tempering his frustration. It won’t help. “Ebbets Field. How did you get to Ebbets?”

Bucky pauses to consider, and the pinch of his face deepens into a frown the longer he thinks. “I don’t … remember. Why don’t I remember?”

He seems to be asking himself more than Steve, but Steve answers anyway. “This place won’t let you.”

“What do you mean, this place?” Bucky says. He wrenches out of Steve’s grip and across the couch. “Tell me what’s going on. Just tell me. You’re scaring me.”

There’s nothing else for it. Steve must tell him now. What other explanation could he possibly give, except the one that’s true?

“You’re dead, Bucky.”

Bucky stares him down for a long beat, defiantly uncomprehending. His eyes dart away, just for an instant, and something slowly starts to fissure behind his blank expression. Steve sees it the moment it hits him. Bucky’s mouth falls open gracelessly, a knife to the gut. He sucks in a wild breath and holds it still. He looks back at Steve, somewhere between horrified and amazed—but then it shifts again, the knife twisting now. His eyes glaze over, unseeing, and then snap shut with such sudden force that Steve startles. Bucky’s breath punches back out of him and his face crumples, blatant agony stretched across it as he cradles his head in his hands. He keeps breathing, jagged as glass, bordering on a sob.

Somewhere in his head, the levees must have finally broken. Steve doesn’t know what’s flowing to the forefront now, what was sectioned off inside of him or what’s coming back—if it’s anything at all, or just the sheer weight of understanding his own death. Steve never stopped to give it much thought himself, had had a purpose that kept him barreling forward—but he understands what it’s like to realize that the world you’re living in isn’t what it seems to be. He understands that more than he would care to.

Steve can’t do anything but sit there helplessly and watch it happen. There’s nothing to do. It had to happen. If they were ever going to get out, this had to happen. Bucky had to understand, and to do that, he had to remember. Steve reminds himself of that, but it doesn’t make the watching any easier. Every second of it aches, his heart in a vice that grows unrelentingly tighter with each beat.

It goes on for a long, long time.

Bucky slumps sideways toward the edge of the couch, near to toppling off of it. Steve doesn’t know what touching him would do right now, if it would help or hurt. His fingers flutter in his lap, but he keeps his hands to himself as Bucky slides off the cushions and onto the floor with a heavy thud. He retches, quietly like he’s trying to hold it back, dry heaving till he finds it within himself to shove his head between his bent knees.

Steve can see him physically trying to gather himself back in. Pick up the cracked eggshell pieces of his mind, set them in some semblance of order—how did the rhyme go? All the king’s horses. He rocks gently on the floor, hands stroking over his scalp, and Steve wishes so fervently that he could take it back. It’s not worth it suddenly, not at all—but it’s too late. It’s done.

Eventually, Bucky’s breathing evens outs. He stops shaking so hard. Slowly, glacially, like he’s afraid to move, Bucky looks up.

He stares across the room first, at the front door, eyes ghosting to the kitchen and the bedroom where the door hangs open. He glances at the coffee table, the couch, like he’s seeing everything with new eyes. Glassy eyes, shot through with red—but there’s a different light behind them now, like someone’s properly screwed the bulb in. The light of clarity.

He doesn’t meet Steve’s eye, too high up or maybe he doesn’t want to. He stares at Steve’s knees. Steve can hardly blame him for that—he wouldn’t blame Bucky if he hated Steve for this. Good intentions only matter so much. It’s difficult for Steve to remember this was worth it in any way with Bucky folded up and fragile at his feet, on the floor.

“Have you been—” Bucky starts, but his throat is too raw and dry. He hacks a cough and tries again in stilted syllables. “You’re—you too?”

“Yeah,” Steve says. “Me too.”

Bucky’s eyes flicker up to his shoulders. “Have you been here this whole time?”

“What?” Steve asks, and then— “Oh, Buck, no. No.”

“But you … They said, they showed me the—” He breaks off again, jaw clenched and a vein in his forehead pulsing. He’s quiet for a moment.

“Bucky?”

A strangled sound tears out of his throat. He jerks backward, hands hitting the floor to catch himself, and finally looks Steve in the eye.

“I killed you.”

“No— _no_ , Bucky, no,” Steve gasps, scrambling off the couch, into the gap between it and the table. Bucky slides away from him across the floor, but Steve grabs him by the ankles and holds him still. “No. You saved me, remember? Didn’t you? That was you. You pulled me from the river. I didn’t die.”

Bucky blinks at him heavily and takes a shallow breath. “I saved you,” he repeats.

“You did,” Steve confirms. His thumbs rub circles over the bones of Bucky’s ankles. Bucky sits silently for a moment, nodding to himself as something settles into place in his head. Steve times their breaths together, deep and even.

Bucky’s eyes flash up to Steve’s face. “Wait,” he bites out. “What did you do?”

Steve frowns. “What?”

Bucky kicks his legs free of Steve’s grip and then lurches forward, his knees thumping against the hardwood. In Steve’s face now, he growls, “What the _hell_ did you do, Rogers?”

“Bucky—” Steve protests.

“We’re both dead?”

Steve sucks in a sharp breath as he catches on. He nods almost imperceptibly.

Bucky grabs him by the shirt collar and yanks them both up to standing. His eyes blaze, but there’s something plaintive in the desperation. “Then _how the fuck_ did you get here?”

Steve winces under his fire, and Bucky immediately corrects. He loosens his grip, smoothing Steve’s collar out with jerky motions. Crossing his arms over his chest, he waits for an answer.

“I walked through the door,” Steve says.

Bucky glowers at him. “Steve.”

“That’s not a joke,” Steve tries to assure him, but Bucky looks far from comforted.

“Why are you here?” he asks flatly.

“To bring you back.”

Bucky starts at that, his eyebrows raised. He forgets to be mad for a moment, incredulity taking its place. “Is that possible?”

“Yes,” Steve says. “Yes. I know it.”

Bucky watches him for any wavering, but Steve stands firm. He _knows_ it’s possible. Bucky must see that bone-deep conviction written all over him, because his mouth twiches into a faint smile. Then he laughs, a jolting bark, and shakes his head.

“Never could take no for an answer, could you?” Bucky asks. He grins, but it doesn’t reach his eyes, something dark about it. “Jesus. Always so goddamn stubborn, not even death is final to you. You gotta fight even that.”

Steve smiles weakly back at him. “Does that really surprise you?”

Bucky snorts and shakes his head again. “No, it doesn’t. Not even a little. Fuck, Steve.”

He turns away abruptly, taking the few short steps to the window. His hands trail over the bookshelf beside it as he stares outside, and he pulls his fingers away, rubbing the grit of dust between them.

“It’s not final anyway,” Steve says softly. “Not for us.”

Bucky looks at him over his hunched shoulder. “Yeah? What makes us so special?”

Nothing. Something. Everything, maybe.

Steve shrugs. “I don’t know.”

Bucky nods like that’s the answer he expected. He grabs absently at the curtains, twisting the fabric around his hand—his mother’s curtains that hung in the kitchen when he was a child, before she replaced them and gave this set to Bucky. He spins around, looking faintly dazed as he moves toward the couch. He runs a hand over the back, the scratchy upholstery rasping against his palm. Steve backs out of his way as he shuffles around to the front of it and slowly sinks down onto the cushions. The springs squeak under his weight. He turns his head and inhales deeply, and Steve knows he can smell traces of tobacco, old perfume, and dust.

Steve’s heart gives a stuttering thump, and some of the tension in his body eases. SHe sits down on the couch too, gingerly, on the opposite side. Bucky’s eyes slide closed, and he tips his head back to rest. His breath hitches softly. Steve yearns to reach out for him, to hold him close and tell him that it’s okay, everything’s fine—but it’s not, not really. Bucky has become someone new in a matter of minutes. It’s disconcerting enough for Steve, to see so many differences in him so suddenly, even the way he carries himself. Where there had once been that lackadaisically confident slope to his shoulders, now he’s stiff and straight even at rest, holding himself still.

“Can I ask you something?” Steve murmurs.

“What is it?”

“How much do you remember?”

Bucky’s chest expands and deflates with a controlled breath. He raises his head, turning to look at Steve with dull, distant eyes. “Enough. Not everything, I don’t think, but—enough, now.”

“I’m sorry,” Steve rasps.

Bucky doesn’t say _It’s okay_. He nods though, his mouth twisting into a hard line, and Steve takes that to mean that he understands. It doesn’t absolve him, but Steve isn’t sure that anything could do that.

Bucky sighs heavily and looks away from him, glancing around the room again with bemused fondness. “Never thought heaven would just be our shitty apartment.”

Steve huffs a laugh. “Me neither. But it’s—it’s been kind of nice, being back.”

“Has it?” Bucky asks—not unkindly or refuting, but sincerely.

“We were happy here,” Steve says simply.

It’s true—true enough, as true as it can be. They were together here. This was their one safe place.

It was never sustainable. They knew that, and never tried to pretend that it was. What they were to each other then didn’t need words. Steve and Bucky understood that, could feel it so tangibly between them that it didn’t need a name. Saying it out loud, putting words to it, would only have made it harder. They knew it couldn’t last. Steve was always going to die young, and Bucky was always going to get hitched to some girl down the street his mother set him up with.

They could have run away somewhere together, and Steve knows they both thought about it. Bucky was never going to leave his family though, and Steve would never ask him to. They did the next best thing that they could think of, and tried to remember to be sensible about it.

After the war started though, pretenses just didn’t seem to matter so much anymore. Everyone was so desperate for each other, felt like they had so little time, so they gave into it. They gave themselves over to each other and let themselves have this happiness between them, whatever it was. It was good—for a long time, it was good.

The war cracked it like an egg. Suddenly there was no _time_ , they were busy, there were more important things to take up their days. Ignoring the mess was easy enough. They had both changed so much, in the blink of an eye from each other’s perspectives. Then there was Peggy, and he loved her too—loves her still, he won’t deny that—but Steve didn’t know what to _do_ about the whole busted up situation between the three of them, so he just didn’t do anything.

It was always water, whatever they had—fluid, freezable, and liable to evaporate. In Brooklyn, they’d at least had a cup to put it in, their little apartment, somewhere to exist. Out there though, it was like trying to hold it in their hands. It just slipped through their fingers.

Steve thought later, after Bucky had died, that they should have tried harder—that it would have been worth it, to try harder. He forgets to look out for himself. That was the one instance where Bucky couldn’t have his back for him. If he had to do it over again, he would have tried harder. He would have said something, made sure Bucky knew how he felt, that he didn’t know if they could do it but he’d be goddamned if they didn’t at least _try_.  There had been all those queer communities down by the waterfront when they’d been growing up. Surely they hadn’t been completely obliterated. Surely there were still people like them, carving out a place, a life for themselves. Couldn’t they do that?

“We were happy here,” he repeats under his breath, watching the threshold of their bedroom, the way the door sways just slightly in the draft. The idea seizes him by the heart, and Bucky flinches next to him, clutching at his own chest as Steve pivots on the couch to face him, his hands gripping his knees.

“We don’t have to leave,” he says.

Bucky blinks at him like he’s just surfaced from his own reveries. “What?”

“We don’t have to leave,” he insists. “We could stay here. No one’s making us go.”

“You’d give up?” Bucky asks quietly. He turns to face Steve too, brow steepled. “Just like that?”

“It’s not giving up,” Steve says. He lays a hand on the couch between them. “If that’s what you want, that’s what we’ll do. I won’t force you to go anywhere, Bucky.”

“Yeah,” Bucky rasps. “You said.”

He reaches out, hesitates for a moment, and then lays his hand overtop of Steve’s. His fingers are cold against Steve’s skin, so Steve turns his palm over slowly—enough time for Bucky to pull away, but he doesn’t. Steve wraps Bucky’s hand up in his own warm one and holds onto him. Bucky fixates on their hands, like he can’t look away from where they’re touching.

“You really think this is heaven?”

“I don’t know,” Steve admits, tightening his grip. “Something like it, I guess.”

“What happens?” Bucky asks as he slides just an inch or two closer to Steve. He glances up at him without lifting his head. “If we stay?”

“I don’t know that either.”

Bucky nods, throat bobbing as he swallows, but he draws even closer to Steve. He lifts his free hand and brushes the back of his fingers over Steve’s cheek. Steve presses into the touch, smiling faintly, and Bucky cups his face in his hand, fingers caressing his temple.

“How come you didn’t lose your memories?” Bucky asks.

“It might be because I broke in.” The answer only comes to him as the words leave his mouth. It’s just a guess, but it could be true.

“Of course you did,” Bucky huffs and rolls his eyes, but he inches still closer.

“Do you wish that I hadn’t?”

“No,” Bucky answers, but then he pauses, frowning. “Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe it’s better to let things happen the way they’re supposed to.”

Steve can’t help it now, reaching out to lay his other other hand over Bucky’s chest. Bucky doesn’t shy away from his touch, so he spreads his palm wide and grips with his fingers. Beneath his hand, he can feel Bucky’s heart thumping, steady as a metronome. Slowly, Bucky lifts their joined hands to lay the back of his palm over Steve’s heart too. Steve’s heart pulses for him, strong enough that he knows Bucky can feel it too—can feel how they beat perfectly in time with each other.

“What if this was what was supposed to happen all along?”

Bucky is silent for a long time, considering, listening to and feeling their hearts. “I guess we can’t know the answer to that,” he says. Finally he closes the distance between them, their thighs and shoulders pressed together. He tips his forehead to rest against Steve’s. His eyes flutter closed.

“I don’t want to lose my head again, Steve,” he says, quiet as a confession.

“We can fight it.”

“How long do you really think we could keep that up?”

That pulls Steve up short. He sighs and closes his eyes too, because Bucky makes a fair point—he doesn’t know. It’s been how many days, and how many times has he nearly succumbed to the force of this place? How many times has he almost slipped right under its spell? Going under isn’t an option either of them want. It would be easier to keep it at bay together, he knows, but it’s not sustainable.

He can feel Bucky’s breath against his face, his sweet, familiar smell surrounding him. It hitches and catches, and then buffets against his skin as Bucky slowly exhales. Bucky pulls back, and Steve opens his eyes to see him, still holding him close but something distant making the blue look grey.

“I’m not the same man that lived here, Steve,” he says. “Not anymore.”

“Neither of us are,” Steve reminds him.

Bucky frowns, but then he looks at Steve—not just his face, but the rest of him too, small under Bucky’s hands. His grimace melts away, and he nods.

“Yeah,” he whispers. “Yeah.”

Bucky slides his hand free of Steve’s and instead wraps his arm around him and tugs him in against him. Steve nestles into Bucky’s side, winding his arm around his middle. It’s warm, and it feels almost painfully ordinary to him to be tucked up under Bucky’s arm like this. Bucky presses his face into Steve’s hair and inhales a deep breath, then lets it rush out in a gust.

“I think we have to leave the past where it belongs,” Bucky says.

His heart protests sharply, constricting inside him. He hides his face in Bucky’s shirt and keeps still till the strangling sensation in his chest eases. Bucky holds him tightly, like he can feel it too. Steve thinks that maybe he does.

“You’re right,” he breathes. “So we go back.”

“We go forward,” Bucky says.

“We’ll need the key.” Steve starts to sit up, but Bucky grips his shoulder and keeps him tangled up with him.

“The key?” he asks.

“We need it to get back through the door,” Steve tells him. “It’s in the crayon box in the bedroom. Let me get up so I can get it.”

Bucky doesn’t let him go. His face folds, and he looks at Steve like he wants to ask something but isn’t sure how to put it to words. Steve waits for him to figure it out, and eventually he does.

“Can we—can it wait till morning?”

“Yes,” Steve answers.

“I just want a little time, is all,” Bucky tells him. He ducks his head shyly, glancing at the coffee table and then at Steve. “Now that I know that I should miss it.”

“Of course.” Steve can’t deny the way his whole body relaxes at that, the knot of him loosening if not pulling free just yet. The light coming through the windows is the rich gold of evening. How it got so late so quickly, Steve will blame on the way time, like everything else, seems to follow its own rules here. “Do you want dinner?”

“No,” Bucky says. “I’d like to just go to bed, if that’s alright with you.”

In lieu of an answer, Steve eases free of Bucky’s hold on him. Bucky lets him go, and Steve stands to hold out a hand for him. They walk to their bedroom together, to their two twin beds and the quilts and the smell of leather shoes—and there’s that squeaky floorboard halfway across the living room, giving its whine.

Bucky pauses in the doorway, pulling Steve to a stop beside him. He tilts his head to one side.

“What?” Steve asks, peering into the room like he might find an incorrect detail, something one of them hadn’t caught till now.

“Do you think,” Bucky asks, “that since this isn’t real, we can make it the way we want it?”

Steve frowns, considering. “I guess so. What did you want to change?”

Bucky inclines his head toward their separate beds, tucked against opposite walls. Steve blinks—and then blinks again, disbelieving, at the queen size bed in the middle of the room. It sits under the window, perfectly centered, their nightstands on either side, the quilts draped over the foot of it.

“We were happy here,” Bucky says, “but that doesn’t mean it was perfect.”

Steve nods, trailing forward into the room to run his hand over the quilt patterns, leaning on his hand to test the mattress. It’s firm, but it yields, a dream under his touch. Bucky comes to stand beside him, turning Steve by the shoulder to face him.

Gently, he starts undoing the buttons of Steve’s shirt. His touch is innocent, nothing behind it but a desire to make Steve more comfortable to sleep. They undress each other like that, stripping down to undershirts and underwear. The evening slips into true night in a matter of minutes outside. Steve lights a lamp to keep the thick darkness at bay.

They each take a side of the bed, folding the covers back to slide in. Steve turns on his side and inches backward till Bucky brushes against him, winding an arm around his middle and slotting them together. It feels warm, and safe—insurmountably safe, the way he always felt with Bucky curved around him, as if it were the one place in the world where he couldn’t be hurt at all. He closes his eyes and falls asleep.


	6. Chapter 6

It should be easy to sleep like this: exhausted to his marrow, comfortable in the wide bed, and Bucky breathing steadily behind him. Steve keeps waking from a dreamless sleep though, pulled away every time he sinks back into it, a relentless tide yanking at him. His body thrums with low nervous energy, left over from the day or in anticipation of the morning. Maybe both. After a while he concedes and rolls over in Bucky’s arms to watch him sleep. It’s something to do.

Bucky blinks owlishly back at him. “Can’t sleep?”

“You too?” Steve whispers.

“I wasn’t trying.”

“You could have said—” Steve starts, but Bucky presses a finger to his lips to quiet him.

“It’s okay, Steve,” he says. “I’m sorry you couldn’t sleep.”

“It’s okay,” Steve murmurs around his finger. He reaches up to take Bucky’s hand, tangling their fingers together under the sheets. He stays quiet for a long time, watching Bucky watch him back. His face is slack and open, but his eyes are tired—not the tired that comes from a long day, but something deeper than that. No dark circles underneath, just a flatness to the blue in the low light of the lamp.

“Why weren’t you trying?” Steve asks.

“There’s a lot to wrap my head around,” Bucky says around a rocky exhale. His thumb strokes slow circles over the back of Steve’s hand.

“I’m sorry,” Steve says.

“Stop.” Bucky levels a hard look at him. “Don’t do that. We don’t apologize to each other for things that are out of our control anymore. Don’t sour it like that. Okay?”

Steve wants to protest. There are a million things he wants Bucky to know that he’s sorry for—but maybe he’s right. What does it help?

“Okay.”

Bucky inhales shakily, his eyes drifting closed. Steve wonders if he might finally be trying to sleep, but then he sees the tiniest of smiles flash across his face.

“Sure have had a lot of near-death experiences between the two of us, huh?” Bucky opens his eyes to look at Steve again.

“Technically,” Steve says, “this is an actual-death experience.”

Bucky’s eyes pop wide, and then he’s cackling, rolling onto his back and pulling Steve along with him. Steve laughs too, and it takes them over completely till they’re gasping for air. It leaves Steve feeling strangely untethered, not in a bad way—freed, if only a little bit.

He kisses Bucky’s chest, the skin warm under his lips, and then lifts himself up on his hands. He gazes down at Bucky’s face, the morning blue of his eyes, the way his brows hang dark and heavy above them. Looking at him, he can feel distinctly the shape of his own heart inside his chest, the way it inflates and _soars_ as Bucky smiles tenderly back at him. He can feel Bucky’s too, inexplicably. The warmth of it is as tangible as the sheets beneath his hands. Its steady beat is familiar as a lullaby.

“I love you, Bucky,” he tells him.

“I love you too, Steve.”

Steve leans forward to kiss him. He teases, brushing his lips over Bucky’s temple, his nose, until Bucky takes hold of the nape of his neck and guides Steve to where he wants him. The kiss is sweet, chaste even, close-mouthed and gentle—but Steve feels it radiating out, passing through his body like a shock, leaving behind a peculiar, hollow sensation.

“What happens?” Bucky breathes against his lips. “When we leave?”

Steve pulls back slowly, his brow furrowing. “I don’t know.”

“Will we just wake up?” Bucky asks, threading his fingers through Steve’s hair. Steve just shrugs, and Bucky’s eyes tighten. “What happened to you, Steve?”

He feels a suffocating pressure on his chest suddenly, the back of his head blaring white hot with pain, but it’s gone as soon as it comes. A shuddering breath, and it passes completely. “A bridge collapsed on top of me,” he says.

“Fuck,” Bucky gasps, gathering him in close against his chest, pressed cheek to cheek. “Will you be okay?”

“I don’t know,” Steve says, and Bucky trembles underneath him. “What about you? What’s the last thing you remember—before?”

“I went to the museum,” Bucky says, “to see your exhibit. And I saw myself too.”

Steve knows well the wall telling James Buchanan Barnes’ incomplete history. He could probably recite the whole of it here and now. “And that’s it? That’s all you remember?”

“It goes black after that. Doesn’t mean I went out then, could just be—” He jabs a finger at his forehead. Steve grabs his hand again, pulling it away to kiss the spot that Bucky hit.

“What do we do then? Once we’re through?”

Bucky meets his eye, hard and steely. “You sit tight. Heal up. Wait for me. I’ll find you.”

“Bucky—” Steve starts, but Bucky cuts over him.

“Let’s not talk,” Bucky says. “Let’s just not talk for a minute, okay? Can we just be? I don’t—I miss …”

He drags his hand down Steve’s neck, over the slightness of his shoulders and along his knobby spine. His left hand strokes over Steve’s narrow jaw, and Steve lays his own hand over top of it. Bucky’s eyes well up as he looks at him, watery and red already.

Steve rises up onto his knees and throws one over Bucky’s waist, securing him between his legs in a tight grip. Bucky’s hands still move over him, rucking up his undershirt and rasping against his ribs and the slight concavity of his belly, a purposeful exploration of his body. Steve leans forward and gets both hands in Bucky’s hair, his fingers curling around the short strands and tugging just enough to coax Bucky up to meet him.

This time, when he kisses him, it’s deliberately desperate. That’s what he is right now—open-mouthed, beyond need. There’s no way to deny it, no reason to anyway, and Bucky kisses him back just as fiercely. He sucks at Bucky’s bottom lip, his hands scrabbling at his scalp, gliding down to frame his face as Steve slides his tongue into his mouth. Bucky rises to meet his intensity, surpassing it somehow despite Steve’s frantic energy. His hands on Steve’s back, holding his jaw as it works under his palm, feel so terribly intimate, something he never thought to miss till it had already passed him by and disappeared.

Steve pulls back a fraction of an inch, only enough to give himself room to breathe for a moment. He thinks about saying something—there is a lot he could say right now, a lot that he probably should. So much has happened between them, now and a hundred years ago, they _should_ talk. He leans away, enough to meet Bucky’s eyes, and he realizes—they don’t need to. Not right now. Maybe later, when everything is done, but now? Now, with Bucky below him, so open and pleading with hands like hot irons, leaving imprints in Steve’s skin as he maps out the shape of him—they don’t need to. They’re on the same page. They both know what this is about.

Because it’s all that matters right now, all Steve says is, “I want you inside me.”

Bucky sighs out, “ _Yes_ ,” and grips Steve by the hips. He flips them over, Steve landing against the mattress with a huff. Bucky holds himself up on his hands till Steve pulls at him, sliding his hands over Bucky’s shoulder blades and compelling him down. Bucky doesn’t need much convincing, melting over top of Steve till their bodies press together into one sinuous line.

Steve locks his thighs around Bucky’s waist and rolls up into him. Bucky grunts and sighs above him, his mouth popping wide, and Steve smothers the rest of his sounds by taking advantage of that open mouth. He seals his lips over Bucky’s, real hunger behind it now. He would devour him if he could, take him so far inside him that he never gets away from him again, so that Steve never loses him ever again. Who knows? Maybe that’s possible down here.

For now though, Bucky kisses him back. Steve licks into his mouth and Bucky meets him there with his own tongue. He thrusts down against him, languid rocking of his hips like he’s in no hurry. Steve supposes they don’t have to be. The friction sparks hot inside him, his heart thumping audibly as it pulses blood down to fill him up. He’s hard quickly, and Bucky is too, and the slide of their erections against each other is enough right up until it isn’t.

Steve keens, loud and long. Bucky pulls away from his spit-slick lips to pepper kisses along his jaw, to his ear, and down to the mole near the juncture of his neck. He lays his mouth over that spot and sucks, and Steve moans again. He pushes Bucky’s undershirt up as far as it will go, trying to force it off but it’s difficult without Bucky’s cooperation.

Steve twerks Bucky’s nipple, hard enough to get his attention without hurting him. Bucky gasps against his neck, and then he understands, pulling back enough to quickly yank the undershirt off. He helps Steve get his off too, and then he’s brushing a wet trail down Steve’s clavicle and chest, lingering at his nipples till they bud up beneath his tongue. Steve fists a hand in his hair and urges him lower, nothing gentle about it. Bucky grins up at him, black pupils overtaking the blue of his irises. Steve forgets his impatience long enough to smile back at him.

Just that long though, before he steers Bucky by the scalp down to where he wants him. Bucky takes his sweet time with it though, kissing at the sharp jut of his hipbones and down to his thighs, sucking bruises into the tender flesh there. He lays a forearm across Steve’s hips to hold him down, keep him from thrusting up into his face like he so eagerly wants to.

Bucky’s kisses feel good no matter where they land, but there’s one particular place Steve wants them now, and eventually his impatience wins out. With his free hand, he grabs the waistband of his shorts and yanks them down to mid-thigh, hauling Bucky away from his knee with the other.

Bucky huffs out a laugh, and Steve feels the warm rush of air against the head of his cock. It’s a deliberate tease, Steve knows, knows _him_ —but then Bucky abruptly sinks his mouth down over Steve. He groans as Bucky swirls his tongue around the head, then he takes him deeper and hollows his cheek. Steve loses himself to the sensation of it, his hand going slack in Bucky’s hair as his toes curl against the sheets. Bucky takes his time with this too, and Steve would let him have as much as he wants, would give him whatever he wanted or needed as long as he kept that trick with tongue up, _Jesus_ —

Bucky lets him go with a wet pop. Steve whines, and Bucky looks up at him with a smirk, but all it takes is one glance for the amusement to shift to dark want. Then he ducks his head back down between Steve’s legs, licks his shaft like it’s candy and keeps going down. Over Steve’s balls, drawn up tight, and down to his hole where he laves over him for a tortuously brief moment before pulling away.

“Do we have—” Bucky starts.

“We should, in the—”

“Got it.” There’s the sound of the drawer, and the lid of the tub creaks open. Bucky tells him, “Turn over.”

Steve complies, yanking his shorts the rest of the way off before flipping over. He settles onto elbows and knees and looks over his shoulder to see Bucky watching him covetously. He raises one eyebrow, wiggling his knees farther apart to spread himself wide. Bucky swallows visibly and then sinks down behind him, mostly disappearing from view.

Then there’s a warm, slick finger at Steve’s entrance, rubbing slow circles into the furled skin there. It takes a moment, but then he relaxes enough and Bucky’s middle finger breaches him, sliding into his body in one tantalizingly slow movement. He tips his head against the sheets and sighs out as his shoulders fall slack.

Bucky wastes no time now, working him open with clear intent that this is only a precursor. Soon he adds a second finger, and Steve’s hands curls into the sheets. His fingers scissor inside him, and his mouth comes down to help. He slips in a third with no warning, tucking it against the other two and sliding it in. Steve gasps and sighs, pliant for him, ready for more—ready to take it if he has to, pushing back against Bucky’s hand and tongue insistently.

Bucky laughs softly against his skin, smacking a kiss against the swell of Steve’s ass even as he curls his fingers deeper into him. He hits that sweetest spot inside of him, and he must be aware of it because he milks it, stroking over it again and again. Steve whines and writhes, reaching a hand back to smear across Bucky’s cheek, grabbing and pulling at his hair.

“Come on, Buck,” he grunts, “give me more, I want it. I want you.”

He expects a joke in return. That’d be their usual tac—one of them begging for it, the other teasing but wanting just as much. This time though, Bucky doesn’t laugh at his insistence, or even smile. He slips his fingers free, laying his messy hand over the small of Steve’s back as Steve sighs at the loss of pressure.

“How do you want me?” Bucky asks.

Steve twists around to meet his eye and sees his face blown open—door ripped off the hinges kind of exposed. He rises up onto his knees, turning to face Bucky fully so he can hold his face between his hands. He kisses him softly once and tastes himself on Bucky’s lips, salt and earthiness layering over the familiar flavor of his mouth.

“I want to ride you,” Steve says. “Would that be good for you too?”

“Yeah, Steve,” Bucky breathes, his cheek sliding against Steve’s, nuzzling into him. “Yeah, yes, anything. Take me however you want, that’s what I want too.”

“Good,” Steve says. He kisses his earlobe, pulls it between his lips, and sucks briefly. His hands glide over Bucky’s chest and down his abs, landing on his waistband. He pops the elastic. “Gotta get rid of these first, sugar.”

In an instant, Bucky’s underwear are on the floor beside the bed. Steve barely has time to blink before he’s flopping back against the pillows, grabbing for the vaseline with one hand while he yanks Steve toward his lap with the other.

“Hey, hey,” Steve says, “any reason we got to hurry so bad?”

“One or two,” Bucky answers. He wraps a slick hand around his dick and nods his head toward Steve’s own erection hanging heavy between his legs.

“Oh, right,” Steve says and rolls his eyes. He throws a leg over Bucky’s lap and bats his hand away so he can grab Bucky’s cock himself. As he curls his fingers around the length of it, Bucky sighs and tosses his head back against the feather pillows. He jacks him, slow but tight, for a long minute before he scooches forward to line himself up.

The blunt head of him presses at Steve’s hole, but he breathes through it and relaxes as he sinks down. It was always something of a jolt to his system each time he eased down onto Bucky’s dick—uncomfortable until the precise moment that it shifted into something electrifying.

He sighs out a gut-deep breath as Bucky bottoms out inside him. Bucky scrabbles for purchase in the sheets, can’t find it, and grabs for Steve’s hips instead, gripping hard enough to bruise. However rough they are with each other, it won’t matter in the morning, Steve realizes. So he raises up, then slides back down brutally quick, too quick—it _hurts_ , but it resonates inside him like a symphony, pleasure and pain tingling up his spine.

Steve leans forward and plants his hands on either side of Bucky’s head. He holds himself just shy of Bucky’s mouth, parted beneath him as he rolls his hips again. The pace he sets for himself, for both of them, is ruthless—no holds barred, because there’s nothing stopping him now. No asthma, no bad heart, no inhibitions. This might be it. He doesn’t think it will be, but for the way that it is right now—this is it. Even if they have it again, it will never be like this, not ever again.

With his eyes on Bucky’s, he keeps it up. He expects himself to get tired quickly, but he doesn’t, not even breaking a sweat as he works himself up and down over Bucky. Bucky grapples with his waist like he can’t figure out where he wants to put his hands, like he wants them everywhere all at once. Steve wants him everywhere too, deep inside him and all over him till there’s no way he could ever forget the feel of his skin.

Bucky’s arms wrap around him then, constricting him against his body till Steve can’t do much more than wiggle his hips. He whines a muted protest into Bucky’s neck, but then Bucky plants his feet on the mattress and fucks up into him sharply, deeply. It sends a shock of heat and pleasure crackling through Steve’s nerve endings. He gasps and shouts, tilting his head to mouth his wordless cries into Bucky’s skin. His cock, caught between them where they’re pressed so tightly, drags with each deliciously rough thrust.

He feels every place where Bucky touches him—his arms wound vice-like around his ribs, his hands searing against his shoulders, his thighs sliding against the back of Steve’s, dragging so deliriously good inside him. His heart hammers out a breakneck rhythm in his chest, building with the pleasure in the rest of him till he feels like he might overflow with it, spill over and never figure out how to get himself back to where he was before.

Suddenly Bucky lets him go. With a wild breath, Steve soars up to kneel above him again. He rolls and rocks, sighing and gasping as he does. Bucky stares up into his face, his cheeks red and the color spreading down the rest of him like a sunburn. Steve likes that he worked him up to that, that he that gets to see that vibrancy in him. Bucky’s hands find his hips again and he helps him, angling Steve just right so he can roll up into him and hit his sweetest spot. When he’s found it, he slides one hand down to grasp Steve’s flushed cock in his hand. He holds his hand nearly still, letting Steve do most of the work. He works himself down over Bucky’s cock and then up into Bucky’s hand, and it’s so good it’s excruciating.

His orgasm wells up inside of him so quickly he barely has time to anticipate it before he cries out. Folding forward to brace himself against the bed, Bucky rings him out as he comes, spilling onto Bucky’s belly and chest. It lasts so long his vision pops white behind his eyelids like he’s died all over again. Only he can still feel Bucky’s hands on him, his hard cock deep inside him, so he knows that he hasn’t.

Before he resurfaces properly, Bucky thrusts shallowly into him again. Steve grunts and lets the movement tip him forward till his face rests against Bucky’s chest.

“Are you good?” Bucky says. “Do you need me to—”

“No,” Steve cuts him off, settling his hips down against Bucky’s. “Don’t stop.”

Bucky doesn’t answer with words, just lays his hands against him to hold him in place again. He starts up a rhythm, slow and languid at first, too careful—so Steve moans with it to encourage him, hot breath against skin. Because he does want it, wants Bucky to finish inside of him. It doesn’t hurt, it’s just so _much,_ overwhelming his sensitive body in the most glorious way. So he lets him know with high little sounds, _uh_ s and _mm_ s, and Bucky gets more confident with each one till he’s pounding into him again. Steve adjusts his head where it’s laid on Bucky’s chest, moving so his ear rests over Bucky’s heart. It pounds too, loud and vital. Steve curls his hands over Bucky’s shoulders and listens to its kick-thumping sound as Bucky fucks him in earnest.

His hips start to stutter, and Steve knows he’s close. He reaches up to stroke Bucky’s flame hot cheek, Bucky turning his mouth into Steve’s palm to kiss it. Steve slides a finger between his parted lips into his mouth, his dick stirring where it’s stuck between their bodies at the memory of being inside that slick heat.

Bucky gasps around his finger, and then his whole body goes rigid underneath him. His hips still, his grip on Steve’s waist impossibly tight, and he bites down on the finger in his mouth even as a heavy groan wrenches out of him. Steve can feel it as he comes, his cock throbbing inside him as Bucky fills him up with hot wetness.

Bucky’s muscles go slack when he’s done. Steve, if it’s possible, slumps even more against him as he pulls his hand free. He straightens out his legs so he’s laying on top of him properly, sighing gently when Bucky’s softening dick slips out of him. Bucky wraps him up in his arms again, hugging instead of holding this time. Steve feels small and slight in his grip, but big too, something swelling inside him—he feels weak, his body spent, but humming underneath that he senses something endlessly powerful.

They stay quiet for a long while, the light of the lamp turning the inside of Steve’s eyelids red. He paces his breath with the rise and fall of Bucky’s chest under his, panting slowly progressing into even, deep breaths. The mess between their bodies grows cold and sticky, but Steve can’t bring himself to care about cleaning it up just yet.

“Steve?” Bucky whispers.

“Mm.” Steve acknowledges him without lifting his head. Bucky strokes his hair tenderly.

“Why do you think it’s just us?”

Steve stills, his eyes flashing open. He hadn’t even considered—his dad, his ma, so many people he’s lost in his life—where are they? Why is it just them? If he boils it down, if he had to pick one person, Steve knows who he would choose, but the question still remains. He lifts up just enough to meet Bucky’s eyes.

“I’m not sure,” he says. “I hadn’t thought about it.”

“I guess it won’t matter soon,” Bucky says. “No sense dwelling on something we can’t know the answer to.”

“You’re right.” Steve nods absently, biting his lip till Bucky thumbs it out from between his teeth.

“Let’s go to sleep, Steve.”

That’s all it takes, really, for the worry to melt out of him. He smiles, and Bucky cranes up to meet him for a gentle kiss. He rolls them onto their sides. Pulling away from his lips, Steve twists and settles with his back against Bucky’s chest, same as they had been before they shucked their clothes. This time he feels sleep coming for him like summer rain, warm and sweet and welcome relief. Bucky hauls him in close and slides a knee between Steve’s legs. He falls asleep with Bucky’s lips pressed to the nape of his neck, vibrating faintly as he hums a quiet lullaby.

 

The morning dawns slow and quiet. Hazy pink light filters in through the window, brightening the room still lit by the lamp. The air is chilly—not cold, but enough bite to it that when Steve awakens, he burrows back down into the blankets. Bucky lays still beside him, mostly on his back now but with one arm looped around Steve’s waist. Steve rolls over to snuggle in against his warmth, circling an arm around his ribs as he lays his head on his chest.

Bucky’s grip on him tightens, his breath stirring Steve’s hair, and there’s no real reason to get up yet. They don’t have to get out of this bed, not if they don’t want to. There’s nothing making them so much as move an inch, beyond the chill and a desire to stay close. He could just go back to sleep, his cheek pressed to Bucky’s warm skin. No one and nothing would tell him that he couldn’t, here.

As Bucky stirs, rolling his shoulders in a stretch, sense slides bladelike back into Steve’s mind.

It’s morning, which means it’s time to go, which means they have to get up. They can’t stay. Warm as he might be, at home as he might feel—the only thing real about it is the man underneath him. They have to leave.

Steve lifts himself up, and Bucky’s hands cling to him but let him move. He sits up properly, reaching over to brush Bucky’s hair back from where it curls at his temples, the way it always does when he keeps it short like this, no matter how valiantly he fights it. Bucky covers his hand with his own and holds it to his cheek. He looks up at Steve, and it’s plain in his stony eyes and the set of his mouth that he’s thinking the same thing.

“We have to get up,” Steve says. “Let’s get dressed.”

He pulls Bucky by the hand out of the mess of sheets, the mattress not so much as squeaking as they haul themselves up and off. They take either side of the bed, undo the tangled sheets, and make it up neatly the way they were taught, tight enough to bounce a quarter. Bucky grabs up their underthings and lays them gently in the bin by the dresser, and Steve doesn’t pause to think about it, but there’s no mess like there should be. They’re clean, fresh as if they had only just come back from the bath down the hall.

Bucky hands Steve clothes from his drawer and then takes some for himself. They don’t take their eyes off each other, not to button buttons or tuck in shirts, watching the other with a melancholy rapture—hungry, a last meal.

Steve reaches up to smooth Bucky’s collar down as Bucky snaps his suspenders into place. His hands linger against Bucky’s neck, over his pulse point. Bucky circles both arms around Steve’s waist, tucking in his duck-tailed shirt before dropping his hands to his sides. Steve glances down at his fingers as they curl into fists, then back up to his face. It’s blank, a page hastily erased, but Steve understands. He drags his hands away and understands even more as his stomach lurches like he’s just leaned over the edge of a cliff. He manages to get his hands away though, gripping at his own pant legs to keep them down.

Taking a step back, he asks, “Do you want breakfast first?”

“Not if you’re cooking,” Bucky says. It’s flat and it doesn’t land, but Steve feels so grateful that he even bothered that he cracks a wan smile. “No, let’s just—let’s go.”

Steve turns and leaves the bedroom, Bucky following and closing the door after them. It clicks shut, the sound much louder in Steve’s ears than it ought to be.

He pauses in the living room, laying a hand over the couch’s armrest. The fabric scratches at his palm, and he wonders—what ever happened to all of this? Some of his personal effects made it into museums: old sketchbooks on display in all their amateurish glory, a small sweater with his name stitched into the collar, the bible he’d gotten at confirmation, what few photographs he had of his mother (since returned to him). The rest of it though—the couch, the Victrola, the coffee table, the whole of Bucky’s record collection and the bookshelf where he stored it—where did it end up after they left?

Something else he’ll never know the answer to.

He glances behind him to see Bucky propped against the table, one hand gripping the edge. His fingers stroke the wood grain as he looks over the room contemplatively. Steve wonders at his even expression, but then remembers—of course, Bucky’s already left this place behind once. He knows how to do it, or if he doesn’t, it’s at least familiar. The army whisked Steve away so quickly, so suddenly, he never thought to memorize or miss the precise way the light hit the floorboards in the morning. Now he knows.

Bucky holds his hand out for Steve, tipping his head to indicate the door. He doesn’t ask if he’s ready, just turns his palm up and meets Steve’s eye with a tight-lipped smile.

Steve reaches for his hand, but he pauses as he remembers. “The key.”

He turns back toward the bedroom, stopping mid-stride as a heavy weight materializes in his pocket. Bucky raises an eyebrow at him, hand still extended. Steve feels his pocket, and the key is there, somehow. It feels incongruous to the whole of this place, that it would do this tiniest of favors for him, but he’s not asking any more questions here.

He fits his hand into Bucky’s, and they don’t bother with their jackets hanging on the hooks. Steve doesn’t look over his shoulder, doesn’t hold his breath or let go of Bucky’s hand as he steps over the threshold and into the hall. He pulls on the dented handle till the door clicks softly shut behind them.

The walk to the bridge is quick, and for once Steve is thankful for the slippery time. He wouldn’t change his mind, not now with Bucky’s hand in his and their steps so resolute, but it is a gift not to have time to consider. Within minutes they’re at the entrance to the walkway. Steve pauses for only an instant, just long enough for Bucky to glance at him and squeeze his fingers.

They step onto the path together, and the blue sky above them starts to swirl with gray. It’s not clouds forming, more like paint mixing together on a palette. It starts to rain, thick blue drops like the color is pouring out of the sky. The water is cold, and soon their hair and clothes are water-dark and soaked through, but they keep moving forward.

On the bridge proper now, Bucky gently pulls his hand free and falls back to walk behind him. Steve pauses, starts to turn, but Bucky presses a hand to the small of his back and pushes him on.

“I’m right behind you, Steve. I’m with you,” Bucky says.

Steve hears the rest of the phrase, unspoken but honey-warm in his chest. He bites back a smile and shakes his head. As he walks, he asks, “D’you remember when I asked you if you’d follow me to the gates of hell?”

“It was into the jaws of death,” Bucky says. “I meant it when I told you I would.”

“I remember.”

“Thank you for following me too.”

“Any time, Buck,” Steve says, his voice thick.

There it is ahead of them. He can see it now, the door shimmering into existence like a mirage. The rain pours down his face, and he forges ahead, the sound of Bucky’s footsteps picking up speed behind him. He stops just inches from it, the silvery patina just as unfathomable as he remembers.

He hears Bucky gasp quietly behind him, and he starts to turn when Bucky grinds out, “Don’t. Don’t turn around.”

“Bucky—”

“It’s almost over, Steve. Unlock the door. It’s time to go.”

He takes a slow breath and reaches into his right pocket for the key. It burns his fingers to touch it, or freezes them maybe, but he gets his hand around it despite the pain. He can feel the blisters already bubbling up under his skin as he fits the key into the lock.

With a twist of his wrist, the locks tumble open with a resonant click.

“Buck, if this doesn’t—if we can’t—”

“I’ll find you, Steve,” Bucky tells him. “I told you I would. I meant it.”

“Okay,” Steve murmurs, and he reaches back his left hand. As he lays the other on the knob, cool fingers tangle with his own, smooth like metal as he turns the knob. The world around them blurs to thick, swirling gray as white light pours out through the crack in the door. Then it’s open, then he’s stepping through it again with Bucky right behind him, his hand in his.

Everything goes white—so solid and pure that it hurts his eyes, may as well blind him for all that he can see, which is to say that there’s nothing at all to see. It’s that same plane again, only he isn’t alone, he can hear Bucky’s heart thundering—or maybe it’s his own—and he can hear him shouting, calling his name, only it’s not Bucky’s voice. Whose voice is it? He spins around to ask Bucky, to see if it’s him yelling, but he’s not there behind him. Steve’s hand is empty, like there was never another in it at all, and his other hand _throbs_.

“Bucky?” Steve cries out.

The door is still there, closed now even though he didn’t hear it shut. Steve takes a confused step toward it. He can feel his pulse in his palm as he raises the key again, unsure what he plans on doing with it but resolved to do _something._ He can’t have gone through all that, gone to such harrowing lengths for nothing, nothing at all but loss all over again.

Something bats him away from the door as if he were flotsam. He stumbles backward, and the key slips out of his hand. It falls in slow motion, like drifting through water, until a shape catches it.

A shape, not a hand, not really. Where there had been solid white before, suddenly black punches out a formless shadow in its brightness. The key sinks into it, both part of the dark and separate from it.

Death holds up the key to its door. Steve would swear it cocks its head at him, despite having no head. He stares straight into its amorphous oblivion.

 _Steven._ The layered, roiling voice sends a shiver down Steve’s spine, but there’s something like amusement tucked into the sound of it. _I told you your chances were at an end._

“I remember,” Steve says.

_You remember, but you do not listen. I said no more. What makes you so special to thwart me so many times?_

“Nothing,” Steve breathes, same answer as always. “I don’t—where’s Bucky?”

 _James is not your concern right now,_ the voice bites.

Steve stays silent in the wake of its forcefulness.

_What you did has not been done for millennia. Few possess the strength of character required. I do not say it lightly when I tell you that I am impressed._

The praise washes dully over him, unaffecting. “Where is he?”

_Is this what you truly want? Was it not perfect?_

“We’re not ready yet. It wasn’t right,” Steve says. “Please, this is what I want. Let me go to him.”

The dark shape pauses for a long beat, then reaches back to lock the door. The key disappears into its abyss, and the door fades away.

 _You will wish for me when you awaken,_ Death tells him. _Remember that you asked. I will not come for you again for quite some time. Remember that it is what you wanted._

Steve’s response dies in his throat. A curious sensation spreads through his body, an empty fullness like someone dumped out his insides and replaced them with water. His heart rate slows to a crawl, thumping out a few sporadic beats.

Steve’s heart goes quietly still, like a breath held and never released. Then blackness slams into him, thick and heavy, and the world goes dark.


	7. Chapter 7

He doesn’t quite wake up. The darkness surrounding him flickers and distorts, light and shapes swimming before him and then getting lost in the murkiness again. He can feel himself stuck at the bottom of the well, staring up and clawing desperately for a handhold to drag himself up and out. He can sense how close he is to the lip of his own life. There’s nothing to hold onto though, no way he can make it out of this pit himself, mired in his own unconsciousness.

A strange tingling flashes through his chest. Steve lays his hand over his heart, and it gives a single sluggish thump. Then the flash again, stronger this time, and his heart lurches again. The next time, it’s a true shock, jarring and painful. His heart stutters and protests, unwilling to do its duty. One more jolt and it gives in, slurring through the first few beats till it settles into a heavy rhythm.

With his heart functioning again, Steve grabs hold of nothing and forces his way up, out, back toward the light.

“We’ve got him!”

“He’s—”

“Alive, yeah, he’s alive.”

“For now, _fuck,_ how long until we…”

Steve is alive again for precisely five seconds before he wishes vehemently that he wasn’t. He knows that it’s five, the memory of it so sharp that later, he can count it out.

_One. Two. Three. Four. Five._

The pain obliterates everything else around him—every sound but the thundering of his heart, every sense but touch, every sensation save for the rending apart of his insides. For a moment he can’t tell if it’s real. It’s just for a single second, but Steve thinks—so this is losing him again. It feels appropriate, his ribs cracking open to set his heart loose, his lungs too battered to breathe. His hand, blistered and aching. The white hot spot at the back of his head where his thoughts leak out onto the pavement, unimportant.

A beat later, Steve understands that it’s real.

There are hands on his body. Their touch hurts, but only because everything does, not because they mean him any more harm. They don’t, do they? The strong fingers at his temples, holding his head still. Someone deftly slicing up his uniform and sliding the tatters off. Another pair plucking rubble off his legs, sweeping the dust off him.

He breathes shallow, quick breaths. Each one is somehow more excruciating than the last. Something isn’t right—beyond the pain, some part of him isn’t moving correctly. His ribs. Should they contract or expand on an inhale? He can’t remember. They do both.

“Is he conscious?”

“I hope not,” grits out a voice. This one he knows, it sounds familiar—friendly, normally, but not right now.

“Steve?” the second voice asks. This one is higher, soft where it usually isn’t.

His eyelashes flutter, enough to catch a glimpse of red-orange and black, brown and silver, and a brighter bloody red behind. His blood? No, no, how would it get into the air like that? That’s not him. He is bleeding, though, the warm pool of it underneath him cooling unpleasantly.

There is a long, low noise in his ears. It sounds like the lowing of cattle. How does he recognize that sound? When did he hear that? Where? His eyes slide shut again as he tries to remember.

“Sam, don’t we have sedatives?”

“Tony?”

“Nothing that’ll knock him out.”

“Anything, _anything_ —”

There is a jab at his thigh, hardly registering as more than a pinch in comparison to the rocking ache of his chest. Something cool spreads out through his veins. His body goes slack, and he slips into a gray middle space, somewhere between here and darkness. He wishes for darkness.

 

He wakes up surrounded by white. For an instant he thinks he’s back, that it was all a dream—the climbing out, the pain. He looks for the door, but all he sees is white, the back of his head pounding and his chest aching dully. A hand—it must be his own—reaches up to his temple like he might be able to pluck the pain right out of his skull, but there’s a thick gauze bandage in the way, taped to his forehead. His fingers find the edges and pull, tossing it away.

He tries to sit up.

His body protests in a way it never has before, so loud he can hear it—or maybe that’s just him, shouting out in agony. It’s like a stitch in his side, like he used to get, amplified so much that it hurts the rest of him too. He shudders and sinks back against the bed, hands flying up to push away flimsy cotton and find actual stitches in his side. He tugs at them with his nails, but then there’s another set of hands on his, holding his wrists and forcing them away.

“Steve, _Steve_ —stop it! You’re hurting yourself!”

He thrashes out of the grip and tries to sit up again, ignoring the pain as best he can, catching like wildfire in the middle of him.

“Hey! Can I get some help in here?”

The hands pin him by the shoulders to the bed. Steve blinks furiously in the too-bright light, trying to see more than just the dark shape looming above him, but his eyes keep sliding out of focus. His legs are still free, so he kicks—and feels something tear, his chest splitting open and his heart pouring right out through the cracks—

“He tore his stitches!”

“I fucking _know_ he tore his stitches, now sedate him!”

“He tore his IV out too.”

“Then put another one in. Jesus— _Nat_ , help me hold him, we gotta cuff him to the bed.”

“So much for coffee.”

There are more hands on him then, so many hands, he wants them off—but they hold him down and pin him in place, pin the tail on the donkey, he doesn’t want to play that game—he has to _find_ —

“Bucky,” he croaks out.

Something cold spreads through him, tempering the fire in his body till it settles into a bed of coals. He feels his muscles loosen, disengaging from the fight, his wrists going limp in the cuffs. His eyelids flutter and shut. Grey starts to wash over him again, a slow-approaching but powerful tide.

He just barely hears the voices talking as his mind rocks down into unconsciousness.

“Is he going to be okay?”

“He’s alive.”

“That’s not what I asked, Sam.”

 

This time, when he floats back up, it’s dark. At first Steve thinks it’s just because his eyes are closed. It takes a long time for him to find the strength to open them, but when he does—still dark.

There’s a low light emanating from somewhere above him, buzzing faintly, but everywhere else is swallowed up by black. It’s—there’s—where is he? There wasn’t a dark place, not like this, except—the forest, the park. Is he in the park? But it doesn’t smell right, no dirt and leaves, only the sting of disinfectant making his eyes water.

“Hey, Steve, shh,” a voice calls out to him from the darkness. Something moves in the thick of it, more solid than the rest, coming toward him. He tries to shy away from it, but his wrists catch on something and hold him fast.

“Shh, honey, it’s okay,” the voice tells him. Its source materializes beside him, cast into relief in the harsh light. “I’m here. I’ve got you. I found you, like I said I would, remember?”

Steve’s eyes finally focus, and he sees him. Dark hair a halo around his head, the glint of something metallic—miraculous, terrible. And his eyes, stormy blue, the sky waiting to fall. An angel, a dream. Bucky.

His chest heaves in a sob, and his ribs twinge with pain but he reaches out for him anyway, stopped again by the cuffs around his wrists.

“That’s okay, Steve,” he murmurs. “They’ve got you pretty doped up, huh?”

He crouches down by the bedside and takes Steve’s hand in his own. Steve tightens his grip and winces. Bucky slides his hand free enough to turn Steve’s over and get a look at his palm, where it’s scalded beneath the thick bandage.

“Guess that’s the least of it,” Bucky says, leaning forward to brush a gentle kiss against Steve’s hand. He exhales shakily and slides his hand up to grip Steve’s elbow instead. His eyes shut, and he breathes for a long minute, unsteadily. Steve watches him, trying to time their breaths but he can’t get his to go that deep—listening for Bucky’s heart, but he can’t hear it. It’s there though. It has to be.

“Buck,” Steve says.

Bucky lifts his head to look at him, his hair falling into his eyes. Steve wants to reach out and fix it, put it to right, help him—how many times has he wanted that? How many times has he messed it up? He couldn’t reach out then, he can’t reach out now, it’s just his _hair_ but Steve feels the tears of desperation welling up and spilling over his cheeks before he has time to notice they’re there.

“Steve, shh,” Bucky soothes. “What is it? Why are you crying?”

Steve just shakes his head, and Bucky reaches out to catch the tears that drip off his chin. His thumb wipes over Steve’s cheeks gingerly, trying to stem the flow, but there’s no stopping it now. Steve can’t stop it, he can’t move, he can’t tuck that damn strand of hair behind Bucky’s ear like he wants.

“You’re all right,” Bucky tells him. He shifts forward to lean over the railing and cup Steve’s face in his hands, one shiny smooth and the other calloused and warm. His mouth twitches. “In a manner of speaking. But you gotta calm down, honey, or a nurse is gonna come in here.”

Steve says his name again. It’s all he can manage right now.

“What? What do you need?” Bucky asks, pulling his hands away to float over Steve’s body like he might be able to fix him.

“You,” Steve says.

Bucky stops his scrutiny and meets Steve’s eye, and for a moment it looks like he’s managed to do it—taken Steve’s pain away and found a way to hold it inside his own body. He bites his lip and glances down at Steve’s middle again.

“I’d get in the bed with you, but I’m afraid to hurt you anymore.”

Steve digs his heels into the bed and wriggles his hips to the left. His chest protests at the movement, but only faintly.

“Okay, okay.” He hears Bucky chuckle, and then suddenly his wrist is free. “Don’t hurt yourself. Let me know if I hurt you—even just the tiniest bit, okay? Steve?”

Steve blinks and looks at him.

“If I hurt you, you have to tell me, okay?”

“Okay,” Steve mumbles. He gives Bucky a wobbly smile, holding out his hand to help him onto the bed. Bucky smiles back at him, but his brow is still pinched. He doesn’t let Steve help him as he hoists himself delicately onto the bed. He settles on his side, perched as far away from Steve as he can be without falling off the edge. Steve starts to shift, wants to be closer to him, but Bucky lays a hand over his shoulder and holds him down.

“No, you stay there. I’m right here, alright? I’m here, Steve. We’re okay.”

Steve sighs but relents, relaxing back into the stiff mattress. He turns his head to look at Bucky, and his eyes hang heavy but he keeps them open. It’s so good to see him, to have him near, feel the way his body shifts the bed and inhale the smell of him. It’s different now—no cologne or tobacco anymore, more sweat and dirt the way he’d smelled during the war, but underneath it is that same familiar sweetness. Steve takes a deep breath and fills himself with it.

“I missed you,” he whispers.

Bucky smiles wanly and lifts his hand to stroke Steve’s face, careful to avoid the worst of the bruising. He runs his fingers over his cheek, along his jaw and his neck, over every uninjured stretch of skin he can touch.

“It can’t have been more than a day or two,” Bucky says. “You had to’ve been under for most of it.”

Steve shakes his head. “I don’t mean…”

“Oh,” Bucky says. “Oh, Stevie, I know.” He inches up the bed till he can curl around Steve without being over top of him, tucking Steve’s head under his chin. He kisses his hair and murmurs, “I missed you before I even remembered what that meant. I did.”

Steve doesn’t like not being able to see his face anymore, but he does like the way his shoulder is pressed against Bucky’s chest, how he can feel his heart thumping heavily. He presses his lips to Bucky’s clavicle and breathes out slowly, his eyes sliding closed.

“You’ll be all right, honey,” Bucky assures him—assures himself too, with the way his voice quavers. “You’ve got good people looking out for you now. That makes me so glad.”

Steve pries his hand free from where it’s wedged between their bodies to reach up and tangle his fingers in Bucky’s hair. He strokes a thumb over his scalp. “I’ve got you.”

“Always do.” Bucky tightens his grip where his fingers are knotted in the collar of Steve’s hospital gown, rasping knuckles against his breast bone. “Listen, Steve.”

“Yeah, Buck?”

“There’s—a few things I gotta take care of.”

“Hmm?”

“I’ve got some unfinished business,” Bucky rephrases.

Steve nods against his neck. “Okay. Lemme help.”

“You’re in no fit shape to—” Bucky cuts off with a huff. He’s quiet for a long beat. “D’you remember in the sixth grade, when Ricky Fontana pushed you around all year?”

“Kept sticking my head under the water fountain,” Steve mumbles.

“Right,” Bucky says. “And I told you I could take care of it, but what did you say?”

“Had’a do it myself. Think it was the first time you actually let me.”

“Yeah, and you gave him what for.” Bucky’s chest shakes with silent laughter, then he takes a deep breath. “I have to do this myself, Steve.”

Some latent part of him resists that, wants to rail against it and follow Bucky, help him with whatever this is. But he just nods and runs his hand over Bucky’s cheek.

“You know I love you, Bucky.”

“That’s the one thing I know for sure,” Bucky breathes. He cradles Steve’s head against his chest, so tender and delicate, like he’s afraid it might crack in his hands. “I love you too.”

Steve nuzzles into him, his words settling over him like a worn blanket, soft and familiar.

“That’s it, honey. Go back to sleep,” Bucky says. “You heal up for me, okay? You do that, and I’ll do what I need to do, and then it’s just you and me.”

Steve sighs, his hand drifting down to find Bucky’s over his chest. As he laces their fingers together, he sinks back down toward unconsciousness, feeling safe—and if not whole yet, like getting there is a possibility now.

“Bucky.”

“Steve,” Bucky whispers, pressing his face into Steve’s hair.

He’s too far into a deep sleep to notice when Bucky crawls off the bed. He latches Steve’s wrist back into the cuff and tucks the blankets gingerly around him before stealing out the open window.

 

He’s in the hospital. That much is clear to him, the next time he comes to. The stiff bed and too-soft pillows, everything in shades of white and seafoam green, the sharp clean smell—all clinical, nothing about it that feels like home. He supposes that it’s not meant to feel that way. Hospitals are transitory places, somewhere to get put back together and then leave, go back home.

Doctors and nurses come and go at regular intervals, and he does still sleep a lot. That’s normal, a nurse tells him. His body has been through significant trauma and needs time to recuperate. He needs time to knit his insides back together and figure out how to be whole again.

Usually either Sam or Natasha is there when he wakes up. They sit quietly in the chair in the corner, watching him with careful eyes like he might disappear in a cloud of smoke. The cuffs are gone, but he still can’t move much. There’s no real need for them to look so worried.

The doctor explains to him what happened after a few days, when he’s lucid enough to understand it. When the bridge collapsed, the debri struck him heavily in the chest, breaking his ribs in multiple places and causing significant bruising to his lungs. Flail chest, the doctor calls it, and pulmonary contusions. A bad concussion from his head hitting the road.

She goes on in a gentle tone, telling him that some piece of the bridge connected directly over his heart at a critical moment during its cycle. The force of it sent him into cardiac arrest, and his heart stopped. Tony managed to revive him with his suit’s AED, but for approximately three minutes, he was dead.

It’s called commotio cordis, she tells him. The rate of fatality is 65%, even with immediate CPR and defibrillation. She tells him that he’s lucky to be alive. He knows. He always has been.

In another few days, he goes back to the OR to get the K-wire that held his ribs together while he healed taken out. Natasha holds his hand while they give him the anesthesia in pre-op. Sam stands in the corner, his mouth twisting. Their faces blur and distort, everything going soft and hazy and strange. It doesn’t phase him.

When he comes out of recovery, the doctor tells him that he’s nearly there. With his healing factor, just another day or two and she can give him clearance to leave if everything goes the way she expects it to. He’ll get to leave and go back home.

Steve isn’t sure what that means anymore.

 

As it turns out, “going home” means “going to Avengers Tower.”

“Someone broke into your apartment in D.C.,” Sam tells him as they drive away from the hospital. They’re somewhere in Massachusetts, headed south back toward New York. “We’re not sure who it was yet, so for now we’re going to house you in the Tower.”

Steve has an idea about who might have broken into his apartment. He stays quiet though, crossing his arms over his middle where he’s still tender. For the most part he’s healed, he can breathe just fine, but moving is still largely slow-going. He’ll have to do physio again. His head is better, still fuzzy sometimes—though he’s not sure he can blame the disorientation on the concussion anymore.

Sam drives them into the city, Natasha following in a car behind. It’s probable that the car ahead is with them too, a dark sedan that Sam makes a point to keep pace with, but Steve doesn’t ask. The security detail feels unnecessary, but he’s not in the mood to talk, much less argue about it.

Stark has a living suite made up for them by the time they get there—has likely had it for a long time, but he doesn’t say that, just leads them through the service entrance and up to the residential floors. Them, because Sam will be staying with him, in a room right down the hall. Natasha’s on their floor too, in the suite next door. Steve just nods and heads to his designated room, with its plain taupe walls and carpet cleaner smell.

It takes him a long time to fall asleep, despite the travel fatigue. When he does, he dreams about—something. It’s on the edge of his mind when he wakes up, something sweet, but he forgets it by the time he gets out of bed.

 

The New York outside his windows looks wrong.

He knows that he’s seen it before. He’s seen it many times, in fact, having lived here for a year before relocating to D.C. Somehow though, it still feels—off. Too bright, too loud, too much happening even with his eagle’s eye view way up in the Tower. He doesn’t bother going down to street level to see if he feels the same way down there. Something tells him he would be stopped if he tried.

He can see Brooklyn, just barely. Not from his own west-facing apartment, but there’s a chapel tucked away into a corner of the medical wing. Its broad windows let the morning light pour in, making the room feel more godly than it has any right to, with its unadorned chestnut pews and cold tile flooring that don’t invoke any kind of warmth on their own.

If he stands in the corner by the windows, the angle is right that he can see the top edge of the bridge. The view is mostly of Queens, but if he strains his eyes—it’s there, he knows that it is. The same way he doesn’t want to take the elevator down to the street, he doesn’t feel particularly compelled go there though. He’s not sure what good seeing it would do.

He takes to sitting in the chapel a lot, whether there’s a service going on or not. It’s quiet in that room in a way that doesn’t feel heavy. In the apartment with Sam, or whatever other team member has floated in that day, the silence feels thick and tangible, like he should do something about it. Here though, sitting in the pew, there’s no one to make him feel guilty except God.

The place has a strange pull on him. He isn’t sure what to think about what it represents anymore. Still though, it’s as good a place as any for him to wait. More than anywhere else in this building, this room holds a sense of hope. It makes the waiting feel less like grief.

Sam finds him there early one evening. He sits down next to him and folds his hands together to pray.

When he’s done, Steve asks, “What did you pray for?”

“You,” Sam says. He twists in the pew to face Steve. His face is drawn and tired, and the way he looks at Steve makes it feel like his fault.

“Me? Why?”

“I think it’s time we talked, Steve.”

Steve frowns at him, ducking his head and shaking it slowly. “I don’t have anything to talk about. You’re not my therapist, Sam.”

“I know that,” Sam grits out. “I am your friend. I’m worried about you.”

“Why?” Steve asks. He sits up straighter.

“Because I saw you,” Sam says. “You had plenty of time to move out from under that bridge.”

“What are you—?” Steve starts, turning to Sam incredulously. He sees Sam’s face, his jaw set, eyes tight. “You think I stayed there on purpose.”

“I think you wanted to get hurt,” Sam says, nodding. “Maybe even wanted to die.”

Steve stares at the lectern at the front of the room, trying and failing to keep his face blank. Because it’s—Sam is right, isn’t he? He is, and Steve has no idea how to explain to him that he’s right but he’s so, so _wrong_. It would only make the situation sound worse, if he tried to explain. That’s the hardest part: He’s surrounded by the impossible, his very life is the thing of imagination—and yet this, he knows, no one would ever believe.

Sam’s breath hitches as he takes Steve’s lack of an answer for what it means.

“It’s not the way you think,” Steve says.

“Right. Then how is it, Steve? Tell me.”

Steve exhales slowly, rubbing his palms over his knees. “It had to be done.”

He can feel Sam looking at him, but he doesn’t want to see it. He knows what he’ll find there—that same resignation when he’d insisted that Bucky was dead, when Sam didn’t believe him but knew better than to press him. When he worked himself thin trying to find Bucky anyway, even though Steve told him that he wouldn’t be able to. He’s grateful that Sam cares. Really, truly he is, but he wishes he knew how to convince him that there’s nothing to be worried about.

It’s done. He doesn’t want to die anymore. That part is over.

Steve doesn’t notice Sam reaching out till his hand touches Steve’s, over his knee. He flinches, tries to pull away, but Sam just slots their hands together, their smooth, unblemished palms touching.

By the time Steve was awake enough to check for the burn on his hand, a reminder that everything had truly happened, it was gone. No bandage, no scab, not even a scar to mark him. He didn’t dare ask the nurse about it, or Sam or anyone else. What if they told him his hand had never been hurt at all? What then? He can’t bear the thought of none of it being real.

No one would believe it, if he told them.

Does he believe it?

“Listen, Steve,” Sam says. “I know you’ve gotten pretty used to going it alone. But you don’t have to, okay?”

The sentiment is so familiar that it tears something inside him, opens some wound he’d hastily patched over and tried to ignore. The sob escapes him before he can catch it and hold it back.

“I miss him so much, Sam,” he gasps, wiping at his eyes. “I don’t know where he is.”

“I know,” Sam says. He grips Steve’s hand tighter and lets him cry.

 

He gets benched.

Sam doesn’t say it in so many words, but Steve knows how to draw a connecting line. It makes sense. He wouldn’t let himself into the fight either, if he were someone else. Besides, the thought of leaving—sometimes missions takes days, even weeks. He can’t be under the radar for that long. He can’t disappear, not right now.

He scrapes together a routine again, to give himself something to do during daylight hours. He goes to physical therapy, always showers afterward, makes sure to eat at regular intervals. The chapel is the one place he lets himself sit and be still. What had Bucky told him? Something about moving forward. He tries.

Steve is just waiting. The waiting is hard, but he’s done much harder things. He holds onto his conviction, slippery as water though it may feel in his hands. He has faith.

Except in the chapel, he’s never alone. Someone is always there with him. It had been that way since he’d gotten back, but now he can see it for what it is. They’re keeping watch over him, making sure he doesn’t do anything drastic. He doesn’t tell them to stop, doesn’t try to explain that he won’t do anything. It doesn’t bother him so much. If it helps them feel better about it, he’ll let them keep doing it.

After a few days, he senses a shift in the atmosphere. It wasn’t tense before, not really—careful but not uncomfortable. Then, like someone slowly pushing a dimmer switch, that changes.

When it’s Tony with him, he talks too much—more than usual, running his mouth like it’s on a treadmill, purposefully babbling away. Natasha hardly speaks at all. Sam makes sure there’s something for the both of them to talk about, a baseball game on the television or a new movie to show Steve.

There’s something that they have decided not to tell him. That much is obvious. What’s not so apparent is why.

He understands that he’s not cleared for duty, but does that mean he has to be shut out from everything? He could still help, or are they forgetting his skill as a tactician?

Only one conclusion makes any logical sense. Whatever the secret is, it has to do with him.

He doesn’t let it alone for long. In fact, the day he figures it out, he walks down to the conference room below and pointedly ignores Clint’s halfhearted attempts to keep him away. The door swings shut with an audible click as he takes the nearest seat at the long oak table. The springs squeak under his weight, Clint sputtering apologies behind him—but besides that, utter silence.

The team looks at him from where they’re arrayed around the table. Natasha, looking stony, and Sam with his frown, Tony’s raised eyebrows. It’s Bruce’s eyes that give them away, just the tiniest twinge of sympathy.

If they hadn’t wanted him here, they should have locked the door. Not that that would have stopped him.

“What’s going on?” he asks. “What aren’t you telling me?”

The room slowly lurches back into action. Tony fiddles with the files in front of him, Bruce leaning over to look and murmuring quietly. Clint pours himself a cup of coffee and sits down beside Tony. Natasha and Sam share a silent conversation until Natasha sighs and lays a hand firmly on the table.

“Give me a good reason why we shouldn’t tell him and I won’t,” she says.

Sam opens his mouth, but nothing comes out. He looks from here to Steve and back again before finally sagging back into his chair. “Fine,” he says, waving a hand toward Natasha.

She pivots in her chair to face Steve. He straightens up in his own, hands on the table. His breath starts to come shorter, though he can’t pinpoint why.

“Someone has been doing our job for us,” she says.

Tony lights up the room with diagrams, and she explains to Steve how someone has been systematically dismantling HYDRA bases across the U.S. and abroad, cracking them open just enough for whatever task force is closest to fry them up like an egg in a hot pan. Always leaving behind information about where the next hit will be. Always sure to leave absolutely nothing else. Interpol, the FBI, the DHS and even the team have tried to catch up, but whoever’s doing it is more efficient than lightning—strikes hot and fast, gone before you blink.

As she talks, the others occasionally interject, but Steve hears them less and less over the hammering of his own heart, the blood rushing in his ears loud as a river.

“Bucky,” he says. “It’s Bucky.”

He looks up from the table to see Natasha watching him with pursed lips, her eyes calculating. Sam clears his throat.

“I thought you said Bucky was dead,” Sam says.

“He was,” Steve says. “But it—he’s not, anymore.”

“Haven’t we been around this block already?” Sam asks, more to himself than Steve or anyone else.

“He’s alive,” Steve promises. His hands grip the edge of the table hard enough to leave indents. He’s alive—Bucky is out there, taking apart HYDRA, and when he’s done he’ll come back to him. He will, won’t he? This means it was real. “I know it’s him. Who else would have that information?”

Natasha eyes him thoughtfully. “Several people, actually,” she says, “but only Barnes has the motive. How do you know? What makes you so sure?”

“I just know. I know him.”

“How do you know we can trust him?” Tony says from his seat, where he’d stayed unusually quiet.

“I—” Steve starts and breaks off, staring at his hands folded on the table. He strokes a thumb over his knuckles as he contemplates an answer. How to explain it to them in a way that makes sense, in a way that convinces them? “He knows himself,” he begins, taking a slow breath to look back up at everyone. “I watched him remember. Bucky knows who he is, and we can trust him. I would bet my life on it.”

They all look into his face for a long beat. Whatever they find there—stalwart belief or a plea, Steve can’t be sure—must be good enough. Natasha nods at him first, and the rest follow after with their assent.

“What do we do then?” Sam asks. “How can we help him?”

Steve inclines his head, silent thanks, and Sam responds with a tight-lipped smile. “Just follow his lead. He knows what he’s doing.”

“We can do that,” Tony chimes in. “That is a thing we can most certainly do.”

It isn’t until later, when his heart rate slows and the last of the adrenaline seeps out, that it occurs to him. Bucky being alive—not only alive but free too, and fighting like hell to make sure he stays that way—isn’t evidence for any of it having been real. Wouldn’t he do just the same thing anyway, no matter how he came back to himself? Maybe he’ll still come find Steve, even if none of it happened. All Steve can do is hold onto that hope.

 

Weeks pass. It’s mostly quiet, occasional bursts of activity and action disrupting the relative peace Steve has cultivated for himself in the Tower. HYDRA gets dismantled piece by piece, and they keep him informed about it now—even try to wheedle him into helping after a while, but Steve doesn’t feel ready for that. It’s strange, but for the first time since he could raise his fists and understand what that meant, he doesn’t want to put himself in any situation that would risk his life. He has to be careful. He promised Bucky he would take care of himself till he got back. This time, he’d like to keep his word.

Sam and Natasha take to giving him play-by-plays of the missions they go on, which isn’t every mission, but they are needed for most. Eventually he starts sitting in on planning meetings too, when Sam gets tired of his critique. With Steve in the room to read Bucky’s patterns (because they are there, unintentional and subtle though they may be), the team starts catching up to him quicker and quicker.

“I nearly saw him, when we first entered the compound,” Natasha tells him one day.

Steve sits up straighter on the couch, tongue suddenly heavy in his mouth.

“I can’t be sure,” she tells him—which means that she is. “I just saw his back as he ducked out a window.”

He wraps his hands around the throw pillow in his lap, trying to will his heart to slow.

“He looked okay,” she adds. “Good even, from what I could tell. Like he’s been eating.”

Two weeks later, Sam tumbles through the front door in a tired huff, covered in mud but looking vaguely satisfied underneath the grime. He toes his shoes off by the door and strides over to where Steve is sitting at the kitchen table, eating his lunch.

Sam leans one hand on the table and says, “I talked to him this time.”

Steve’s fork falls out of his hand. It bounces off the edge of the plate and clatters to the floor, loud in the quiet of the room. “You did?”

“Think he hung back intentionally, but he wouldn’t tell me that,” Sam says. He bends down and picks up the fork, sets it back on the table. Steve picks it back up absently, all thoughts of eating out of his brain.

“How is he?” Steve asks, throat uncomfortably tight. He had wanted them to meet properly, but had always thought he would be there to see it happen. Watch the two of them bristle at each other, or maybe joke around. He tries to picture what it was like. Did Bucky single out Sam to wait for? Did they shake hands, bother with introductions at all? Did Bucky seem alright? Had he cut his hair? Been sleeping enough?

“He seems alright to me, Steve,” Sam says, wiping at a drying spot of mud on his cheek. “He said he was good. Said he missed you, when I called him out on it.”

“He—he misses me?” Steve asks quietly.

Sam raises his eyebrows. “‘Course he does, but don’t take it from me. Here.”

He pulls a folded piece of copy paper out of a pants pocket. As he lays it on the table, he claps Steve on the shoulder before walking off down the hall toward the bathroom.

Steve doesn’t hear his boots on the floor or the door when he shuts it too hard, focused entirely on the paper before him. It’s wrinkled, smudged with dirt where Sam had touched it. For a moment, he’s too scared to pick it up, afraid it will turn to water or ash or nothing in his hands, not real, all a dream.

He takes a slow, deep breath and picks it up. It feels solid in his hands. The paper rasps against his palms as he unfolds it, getting dirt on his fingers.

_Steve,_

_Thanks for sitting tight. See you soon._

_\- JBB_

 

The note finds a home in the front pocket of his shirt. He keeps it folded neatly there, right over his heart, save for the moments when he pulls it out to read it over again. The edges start to wear and soften after two days.

He’s sitting with it out again late one night. The rest of the team had long since gone to bed—he knows, because he watched them trickle out of the common room one after the other till he was alone. Being around everyone again felt good, their presence grounding and comforting like a touchstone, but he hadn’t slept much the past few days despite it.

Eventually he made his way down to the chapel again. The moonlight pours in the windows, throwing everything into strange black and white. By its faint glow, he reads the note again, thumb stroking over the three initials. Bucky had never bothered to sign his name any time he passed Steve notes during school, left him one at home, handed him a slip of paper in the field. He wonders at the difference, a confirmation of the author’s identity.

The double doors open with a low whine of unoiled hinges.

“Come on in,” Steve says, folding the note up and tucking it back in his pocket. “Just me in here.”

He doesn’t bother turning to see who else would be seeking solace here at half past two in the morning. Whoever it is probably wants as much solitude as he does.

His pew creaks as the person settles into it. Steve sighs quietly, frowning. There are ten pews in this chapel—why would the person pick his to sit in? He keeps his eyes trained on the lectern ahead, past it where the lights of the city mix with the moonlight so it’s never full dark.

“Ain’t God supposed to be here too? That’s what the nuns always taught us in Sunday school.”

He gasps and blinks hard, fingers raking over his thighs to keep himself from turning. He knows that voice, but—

“You can look at me, Steve, honey. I’m not going to disappear soon as you do.”

Steve takes a moment to settle his breathing, in and out slowly like he’s been doing since he was a child, only now his lungs are supposed to work just fine. He lifts his head and turns to look.

Bucky sits at the other end of the pew, looking back at him with bright eyes. He has his knees on his elbows, hands clasped together like he might pray or try to blow warmth back into them with his breath. The left one glints in the low light, shining silver that disappears under his sleeve.

“You done praying?” Steve asks quietly.

Bucky smiles and shrugs. “Maybe so,” he says. “Maybe not ever.”

He sits up and twists in the pew, unfolding his hands and holding them out long. Steve’s heart thuds and propels him across the bench into the embrace. Bucky’s arms curl around his shoulders, hauling him in close and tight. Steve gets his own arms around Bucky too, his face pressed to Bucky’s chest. He inhales the clean, sweet scent of him through the soft fabric of his shirt, lets it fill him over till he’s overflowing with it. Then he turns his head and lays it over Bucky’s sternum, right over his heart, where he can hear it beating out a steady, vital rhythm. It doesn’t match the pace of Steve’s own heart now, but it’s enough to hear it beating at all.

“Hi, Stevie,” Bucky breathes into his hair. “I’m home. Had to run a few errands on the way—sorry I’m late.”

A sound bubbles up out of Steve’s throat, either a laugh or a sob, he can’t tell. His face is wet, though he’s not sure when that happened. He presses even closer to Bucky, nearly crawling into his lap before Bucky pulls his arms away with a huff. Steve protests wordlessly, but Bucky just hefts him up properly into his lap and pulls Steve against him again. He’s entirely too big for this now, but Bucky doesn’t seem to mind. He strokes Steve’s hair as Steve cries into his shirt collar, wrinkling and ruining it, but he can’t be bothered to care. He knows it won’t matter to Bucky either. They’ve got other shirts.

“I didn’t …” Steve breaks off and sucks in a breath.

“What is it?” Bucky asks, hands never stilling where they touch Steve’s hair, rubbing soothing circles into his back.

“I wasn’t sure. I thought it might’ve been a dream,” Steve rasps.

Bucky’s chest shakes underneath his head. “Oh, you’re creative, but you’re not that good, honey.”

Steve sighs raggedly, tears still slipping down his face, but he smiles. He pinches at Bucky’s ribs. “It’s a sin to be rude in church.”

“Since when?” Bucky laughs properly, and Steve joins in, pulling back enough to watch the way the smile makes Bucky’s face scrunch. Even in the stark light, he can see his cheeks heating up with rosy color, how his eyes shine so startlingly blue. That color bowls him over every time he stops long enough to consider it—so clear and cool and deeper than the ocean.

Bucky meets his eye and sobers, his face growing serious. His brow pinches together, and he lifts his right hand to cup Steve’s cheek. He looks at Steve intently as he speaks.

“It was real, Steve. I was there too. Our apartment, the key, the bridge. I followed you out through that door.”

Steve nods, and some weight that had been sitting on top of his heart lifts away. The relief is so palpable that his eyes well up again, almost startled by the release he hadn’t known he needed so desperately.

Bucky tears up too, his long hair falling into his eyes. Steve reaches up and tucks it neatly behind his ear before leaning in to kiss him.

It’s not hurried or burning, no desperation behind it. They’re past that now. Instead, Steve kisses him sweetly and gently—reverently. Bucky’s lips move with his like a dance, the only waltz Steve ever managed to learn how to do with him. He’s a lousy dancer, but this is something he’s good at. Bucky hums against his mouth, soft and content. He pulls back only to press closer, his lips at Steve’s cheek and jaw, leaving quiet kisses all over him that Steve feels like imprints on his skin. He wouldn’t be surprised if there really were marks left behind.

“Can I ask you something?” Steve says.

“Of course.”

“You said you had to do it. Why?”

Bucky inhales and leans away, settling back against the pew. Steve ducks his head to meet his eye. “Why’d I have to take out HYDRA?”

“I understand that,” Steve assures him. “But there’s more to it, isn’t there?”

Bucky bites his lip, casting his eyes over Steve’s shoulder at the lectern.

“Do you—you don’t think you deserved it, do you?”

Bucky stays silent, chewing his lip, and won’t meet Steve’s eye. Steve maneuvers out of his lap to sit beside him, gathering up Bucky’s hands between his own.

“You did, Bucky. You were there. Obviously you did.”

“I know.” Bucky watches their hands, his thumb tracing over Steve’s palm. “Look, I don’t know if I believe in all this anymore.” He glances around the room. “I don’t know if that was even heaven, where we were. Maybe I did deserve it. I guess I did.”

“Then what?” Steve prompts.

“I want to feel like I earned it,” Bucky says. “The way things were left before, I didn’t feel that way. I want to earn it.”

“Bucky, you don’t have to—”

“I have to make my own peace, Steve, whether someone’s checking my balance at the end or not,” he says sharply, meeting Steve’s eyes. Steve flinches, and he softens. “I made a start. Helped make the world a safer place too.”

Steve nods. “I understand, Buck. As much as I can anyway.”

Bucky smiles at him faintly. “Thank you.”

Steve pulls his hand free to point a finger at Bucky. “If you ever make me sit around while you pull a stunt like that again, I’ll box your ears. If you ever die on me again, I’ll kill you myself.”

Bucky barks a laugh. “You’re one to talk, Rogers.”

Steve socks him in the chest halfheartedly, snickering. Bucky laughs with him, and they fill the chapel up louder than bells. They’re alone in this room, but Steve knows anyone could burst in in a moment to see what all the ruckus is about. That quiets him. As overjoyed at he is to have Bucky back, safe and close enough to touch, he doesn’t need the whole world to know.

“What do we do now?” Steve asks.

“Same as always,” Bucky says. He stands up from the pew and holds out his hand. “We go forward.”

Steve slots his hand with Bucky’s, flesh against metal, and lets Bucky pull him up and out into the aisle. Side by side, they walk toward the door and step through.

 

We are all going forward. None of us are going back.  
\- "Snow and Dirty Rain," Richard Siken


End file.
